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Andrea Neustein
Victoria Rogers
Jason Waite
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INTRODUCTION i
ESSAYS
Maintaining Development: Redefining the Relationship 8
Victoria Rogers
Maintenance, Renewal, Decay, Death, Air, Time, Dust, 22
and the Gallery
Andrea Neustein
Maintenance and Dependency 3 8
Nina Horisaki-Christens
The House of Invisible Cards 5 2
Jason Waite
ARTISTS
Michael Bramwell 66
Goldin+Senneby 70
Ashley Hunt 74
Masaru Iwai 78
Yve Laris Cohen 82
Sam Lewitt 86
Park McArthur 90
Salvage Art Institute 94
Karin Sander 98
Taryn Simon 102
Pilvi Takala 106
Mierle Laderman Ukeles no
MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969! 1 1 8
PROPOSAL FOR AN EXHIBITION, "CARE"
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION 124
IMAGE CREDITS 128
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 130
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INTRODUCTION
After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
MlERLE LADERMAN UkELES,
"Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969:"
"Maintenance is the work which allows for all other work," the ever-
present but simultaneously unseen and undervalued activity that sus-
tains our infrastructure, our society, and our lives.1 Often repetitive and
mundane, this work maintains the objects, structures, and institutions
that undergird our constant struggle against entropy and decay. Thus
maintenance takes form not only through labor, but also through the
entire system of individuals, objects, and infrastructures that construct
our daily lives. Durational by nature, maintenance networks provide
life-sustaining mechanisms of care. But by the same token, these sys-
tems may direct and limit life's possibilities, or even become malevo-
lent systems of control. By dismantling our collective blindness toward
maintenance activities, we can begin to examine how they condition
our lives. Bringing maintenance into view exposes a constantly shifting
set of social, political, and affective relations and invites questions about
what needs to be maintained and under what conditions that mainten-
ance occurs.
Large-scale systems of maintenance often seem "characterized
by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogene-
ity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities."2 We tend to
imagine ourselves and the world surrounding us as smoothlv running
machines rather than as a series of jerry-rigged contraptions in need of
constant problem-solving and repair. The "cultures of normalized and
taken-fbr-granted infrastructure" allow us to overlook the constant work
being performed on the networks upon which we depend, the activi-
ties that are omnipresent throughout the day and continuing through
the night.3 Maintenance is all around us, in plain sight but unacknowl-
edged— manifest in the form of delivery trucks, caregivers, police,
telecommunication cross-connect boxes, electricity cables, and water
mains. Maintenance Required examines artistic practices that frame and
critically engage these invisible systems of life support, practices that
articulate the paradoxical tensions of large-scale systems of maintenance
whose power to sustain life may also entail the power to constrain it.
A key text in the struggle to make maintenance visible is the
"Manifesto for Maintenance Art" (1969), in which Mierle Laderman
Ukeles redefines maintenance activities as art. Referring to the quotid-
ian, repetitive, and frequently domestic chores that make up a sizable
portion of her everyday life, Ukeles recontextualizes her daily house-
keeping tasks as artwork, claiming "my working will be the work."4
With this statement Ukeles redefines the process of maintenance as
art, grafting the value systems associated with "high art" onto the daily
activities associated with maintenance. In this transformation, Ukeles
adopts strategies familiar to emerging conceptual and performance
practices of the time that aimed to redefine the boundaries of art and
society. Like other artists, Ukeles claims a space for the everyday within
art, but she takes this logic a step further by focusing on some of the
most devalued and routine aspects of daily life. As her practice pro-
gressed, Ukeles broadened her focus to systemic mechanisms of main-
tenance, becoming the unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York
City Department of Sanitation in 1977, a position she has held for the
last thirty-six years and which may be viewed as a durational action in
itself. Through her work, we first begin not only to see but also to value
maintenance as a vital, beneficent force.
Yet systems of maintenance also involve both precariousness and
control. The issue of control is embedded in the etymological root of
maintenance: the Latin phrase manu tenere means "to hold in hand."
It is the grip of the maintenance hand, so to speak, that sustains order.
This grip is outlined in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," in
which Gilles Delueze develops the Foucauldian notion of a disciplinary
INTRODUCTION
-'•.• -, .•?•.- ;■'•'■,• .. ■ ' ■'.■■'
society to analyze the new mechanisms infused into maintenance by late
capitalism, particularly competition, continuous training in the work-
place, never-ending regimes of education, and the destabilizing effects
of financialization.5 Taking Delueze further, we argue that the large-
scale systems that maintain society are themselves precarious, a fact that
has become ever more evident as they grapple with economic crises,
austerity, the intensified decoupling of financial markets from material
production, shifts toward service-based economies, and the accelerated
velocity of information. Returning to the etymology of maintenance,
a hand cannot hold on to something indefinitely, and there may be an
emancipatory potential in loosening its grasp. The social order that is
maintained through economic, social, and political systems continues
only because we wake up every morning and reproduce it. Here the
capacity for radical change is ostensibly hindered by the need to pro-
vide repeatedly the basic necessities of society, as hinted at in the epi-
graph above. However, as recent revolutions and uprisings have shown,
political and social transformation can be accompanied by new forms of
self-organization of services, further destabilizing the notion that the
existing order of society must be maintained. What would it mean to
take Ukeles's question about post-revolutionary garbage collection at
face value, and see it not as a cynical dismissal of the ineffectiveness of
revolutions, but as an invitation to revolutionize maintenance?
The varied practices included in this exhibition address some of the
problems around maintenance, among them the contested visibility
of maintenance workers and the class inequities that complicate their
status, the interests at work within the systems that create and sustain
value, and the increasingly apparent vulnerabilities of physical infra-
structures. The task of deferring entropy takes on a new significance in
the age of the planned obsolescence of the object. In this situation, repair
and reuse may produce their own forms resistance. By articulating the
disjuncture between dependency and control implicit within mainten-
ance structures, this exhibition asks: What needs to be maintained?
Who determines what will be maintained? And under what conditions
are these maintenance cycles kept in motion?
INTRODUCTION
I I
IV
Notes
i Helen Molesworth, "Work Stoppages: Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Theory
of Labor Value," Documents 10, Fall 1997, 19.
2 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, "Out of Order: Understanding
Repair and Maintenance," Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3, May 2007, 10;
available online at http://tcs.sagepub.eom/cgi/content/abstract/24/3/1.
3 Ibid.
4 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition, 'Care'" (1969), reproduced in this catalogue, pp.
118-121; originally published in excerpted form in Jack Burnham, "Problems
of Criticism," Artforum, January 1971, 41; reprinted in excerpted form in
Idea Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1973); and Six Years: The
Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to igj2 . . . , ed. Lucy R. Lippard
(New York: Prager, 1973), 220-21.
5 Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59,
Winter 1992, 3-7.
INTRODUCTION
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Interviewing Passersby on the Side-walk about Their Maintenance
Lives, 1973-74. Outside A.I.R. Gallery, New York. Part of the Maintenance Art
Performance series
MAINTAINING
DEVELOPMENT:
REDEFINING THE
RELATIONSHIP
Victoria Rogers
Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball
of every revolution: after the revolution, who's going
to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
Development: pure individual creation; the new; change;
progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.
Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual
creation; preserve the new; sustain the change;
protect progress; defend and prolong the advance;
renew the excitement; repeat the flight;
show your work — show it again
keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy
keep the home fires burning
Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change.
Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.
MlERLE LADERMAN UkELES,
"Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 19691"
In 2011, Judith Butler examined the political movements that have
reclaimed public spaces across the world over the past few years. Of
Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution, Butler writes, "a certain
■Mr* • " *•?**
sociability was established within the square, a division of labor that
broke down gender difference, that involved rotating who would speak
and who would clean the areas where people slept and ate, develop-
ing a work schedule for everyone to maintain the environment and to
clean the toilets."1 Similar maintenance routines took place in Zuccotti
Park, where the occupiers used self-directed maintenance to thwart
attempts to disperse them. Maintenance of the park became a political
act, a direct response to Mayor Bloomberg's initial declaration that the
park would be shut down, supposedly temporarily, while "the property
was cleaned in stages."2 Fearing the cleaning was a pretext for evict-
ing the demonstrators, Occupy Wall Street announced via Twitter that
they would clean the space themselves, asking supporters to gather and
defend against eviction, soliciting cleaning supplies, and forming work
teams and cleaning brigades.3
Rooted in the practice of "occupation" and sustained by the physi-
cal gathering of people, Occupy Wall Street took its meaning from,
and found success in, the inhabitation of space. Occupy 's influence was
dependent in part on maintaining a physical presence, and therefore
on systems of upkeep that dealt with a major consequence of bodily
occupation: the accumulation of waste. Though less visible — and less
heralded — the elaborate system of physical maintenance (sweeping
and mopping brigades, shifts of people emptying trash receptacles)
that developed at Zuccotti Park sustained Occupy Wall Street. These
moments of contemporary political action demonstrate that mainten-
ance activity needs to be rethought not only as a support for collec-
tive action, but as potentially revolutionary in its own right. As Butler
shows, maintenance is an inherent part of political action and a means
through which to sustain occupation.
Decades before Occupy Wall Street, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote
"Manifesto for Maintenance Art," a document in which she challenged
modernist concepts of artistic practice by emphasizing what these con-
cepts excluded: the role of maintenance in art.4 Reacting against the
traditional role of the artist as an autonomous maker of unique, aestheti-
cized objects, Ukeles decided that she no longer wanted to understand
her art practice in terms of production^ In modernist aesthetics, pro-
duction is linked to artistic development, seen by Ukeles in the work of
Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, who are examples of "the artist-
IO VICTORIA ROGERS
genius [who] never repeats (him)self."6 Contrary to the avant-garde's
injunction to "make it new," Ukeles encourages viewers to "maintain
it!"7 In her manifesto, Ukeles defines maintenance and development
as simultaneously oppositional and dependent. Development encom-
passes that which is new and in constant flux; maintenance is the drab
but necessary work that is rarely acknowledged. While development is
characterized by evolution and change, maintenance is repetitive and
circular. Development is primary, while maintenance is secondary and
derivative. The predictability of maintenance systems precludes them
from initiating change and progress.
Yet Ukeles begins to question the opposition between development
and maintenance when she asks, "after the revolution, who's going to
pick up the garbage on Monday morning?" Her "revolution" is presum-
ably equated with development, while maintenance encompasses the
work that takes place before and after it. Does this thinking suggest
that revolutions are without effect, only lasting until someone comes
along to restore the old order — to sweep them away and "pick up the
garbage" left behind? Or does Ukeles's question imply that revolutions
are not sustainable without some element of menial "clean-up" — that
the initial flash of a novel concept is for naught without a system that
implements and supports this concept? Must the progressive elements
of revolutionary concepts or events themselves be maintained through
laborious physical action? Whose role is it to "maintain" this progress?
These questions highlight a central tension in Ukeles's extended
career. Initially in her manifesto, and ultimately through her practice,
Ukeles dismantles the strict divide between maintenance and devel-
opment, preferring instead a feedback system between the two. She
suggests that while maintenance systems derive their relevance from
development systems, the opposite is equally true. By lifting mainten-
ance up as a life-sustaining practice in its own right, Ukeles's work does
away with the traditional hierarchical relationship that privileges devel-
opment over maintenance, which is historically also a gendered divide.
During Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973), performed at the
Wadsworth Atheneum, Ukeles washed the front steps of the museum
with the same cloth diapers the museum's curators used to clean works
of art. Her labor blurred the line between private space (coded femi-
nine) and public space (coded masculine), drawing out domestic house-
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT
work for public viewing.8 Traditionally, women have been consigned to
activities of maintenance and reproduction in the home, while men have
controlled the space beyond the home, the realm of labor and produc-
tion, with the exception of men who work professionally in maintenance
jobs.
By focusing her own work on maintenance activity, Ukeles delineates
the rough contours of a conceptual framework in which maintenance
is valued above development, though the pair operate reciprocally. For
Ukeles, maintenance is the work that enables and makes development
possible, and she attempts to reveal the importance of maintenance
through works such as the Maintenance Art Questionnaire (1976). Ukeles
initially developed the questionnaire for a performance in the exhibition
space at 55 Water Street, at the time managed by the Whitney Museum
of American Art, in which she asked members of the viewing public
to answer a series of questions about their own maintenance activity,
including what they do to survive. By equating maintenance with sur-
vival, Ukeles privileges maintenance over other kinds of activities and
redefines the relationship between maintenance and development alto-
gether. Her reversal disrupts the economy of the initially hierarchical
binary opposition between development and maintenance, simultane-
ously complicating both terms.9
The questionnaire calls attention to both the centrality and ubiquity
of maintenance acts, values typically attributed to development systems.
The questionnaire, which subsequently traveled across the country,
operated as a type of equalizer, demonstrating the necessity of main-
tenance acts across varied populations, from artists to city planners to
maintenance professionals. Recently, Ukeles updated the questionnaire
for Maintenance/Survival and its Relation to Freedom: You and the City
(2013) at the Brooklyn Museum, focusing her questions on the series of
maintenance systems (both individual and municipal) that developed in
response to Hurricane Sandy.10 At a point of breakage in social systems
like that introduced by the hurricane, the importance of maintenance
systems comes into clear view.
Ukeles challenges the way in which existing systems make invisible
both waste and the workers who dispose of it, but less often does she
question what systems are maintained and why. Is Ukeles's exposure of
maintenance systems, as a political act in itself, enough? Does she just
VICTORIA ROGERS
bring maintenance to light in an attempt to change how viewers value
the practice, or does her work alter the concept of maintenance itself,
which in her own practice includes corporeal acts of cleaning, wash-
ing, and caring? By drawing attention to maintenance work, Ukeles
places the onus on the viewer to pick up where she leaves off, question-
ing to what degree observers can separate themselves from maintenance
systems.
Some more recent practices further rupture the hierarchy of main-
tenance and development by challenging the relationship between the
two in new and varied contexts. Michael Bramwell and Pilvi Takala
offer insights into the revolutionary potential of Ukeles's work on main-
tenance through their respective practices, each partly founded on cor-
poreal systems of maintenance. Acting as a janitor in Harlem, Bramwell
approaches maintenance as a manual, intensive task of physical labor,
while Takala, interning at a Helsinki consulting group, treats mainten-
ance as a largely contemplative, intellectual exercise.
Bramwell focuses on revaluing communities and monuments by
caring for public space. During Building Sweeps (1995-96), Bramwell
scoured Harlem for the most derelict space to clean, using character-
istics such as drug activity, graffiti, and smell as measures of decay."
Dressed in janitorial garb, Bramwell swept, tidied, and washed the
common spaces of his chosen tenement buildings, which the acting
superintendents had neglected. Building Sweeps is a work of opposition,
inherently critical of the dysfunctional existing system. Bramwell took
action by stepping in on an individual level once the system of upkeep
had broken down. Maintenance here has the power to transform, incit-
ing a type of progress of its own by eventually stimulating residents to
advocate for themselves.
Bramwell mirrors Ukeles's investment in community: the occupants
of his Harlem tenement buildings operate within a specific commu-
nity much like the sanitation workers that Ukeles met during Touch
Sanitation (1979-80), a project in which she shook hands with and
thanked the city's approximately 8,500 sanitation workers. Both artists
embed themselves in social groups: Ukeles became the unsalaried artist-
in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation in 1977, a
post she still holds today, while Bramwell returned to the same Harlem
tenement week after week until drug dealers succeeded in driving him
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT 13
Michael Bramwell, Ground 'Zero Sweeps I— II: Collaborative Sweep, Hiroshima, 1996. Inkjet
print, 11 x 14 in. (28 x 35.6 cm)
H
VICTORIA ROGERS
' . C -• ;.'•<•>
out. They each partake in the physical labor of cleaning and their sus-
tained involvement points to the repetitive nature of maintenance itself.
The marginalization of each of these communities is an entry point
for both of the artists. Bramwell came to work in Harlem's African-
American community shortly after the height of the crack epidemic,
which both tore the community apart and strengthened the ties between
its surviving members.'2 Bramwell's presence also drew attention to the
frequency with which African-Americans occupy these types of posi-
tions: an African-American male performing a janitorial task is hardly
unexpected. The son of a Bronx building superintendent, Bramwell's
relation to the maintenance act runs deep. Like Bramwell's Harlem
neighborhood, the community of sanitation workers with whom
Ukeles worked was also isolated, as employees of the city treated with
less respect than their peers of police officers and firefighters. In 1968,
7,000 sanitation workers went on strike, reacting to their difference in
compensation (in size of both paychecks and pensions) from other city
workers.13 Ukeles's connection to New York's sanitation workers was
first made through her own domestic maintenance. Ukeles drew paral-
lels between her labor (caring for her children, cleaning, cooking, wash-
ing) and theirs. As Ukeles's practice developed, her work widened from
a focus on the home and private forms of self-maintenance to encompass
the gallery or museum space and finally the maintenance of a city in its
entirety.
Though invested in the communities in which they worked, both
Bramwell and Ukeles came to them as artist outsiders. While Bramwell
emphasizes the potentially active role of the community, Ukeles privi-
leges the position of the artist as agitator, whether by performing the
acts of maintenance herself or miming the maintenance work of others.
Works such as Touch Sanitation revalue the status of maintenance work-
ers and their labor. In contrast, Building Sweeps employs maintenance
work as a means to a larger end, in hopes that Bramwell's activity will
take the community to task and inspire residents to alter their environ-
ment. According to one journalist, Bramwell's project pushed the resi-
dents to act, "baiting the super [to clean] like a trapped rat."'4 For Ukeles,
maintenance is enabling in a literal sense; the labor of maintenance
workers creates tangible change by ridding the city, home, or commer-
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT 15
cial space of garbage and dirt. Bramwell however focuses less on those
providing maintenance than on those affected by maintenance work; he
wants to leave the tenement's inhabitants with a sense of agency. While
Ukeles ultimately maintains control over her work, Bramwell privileges
the community in which he is working, ultimately leaving it to others
to pick up where he left off. Bramwell's broom sweeps signify tangible,
sustainable change, intimating progress to come, progress that in turn
must be maintained by the community.
In Harlem, maintenance work extends beyond the physical structure
of the tenement building — Bramwell's act of caring for the building
alters the sense of worth the occupants had of themselves. In Bramwell's
practice, maintenance and development converge, as maintenance pro-
vides the ground on which development sustains itself. By emphasiz-
ing the impact of maintaining existing physical structures, Bramwell
deemphasizes redevelopment, a possible act of destruction of existing
systems caused by real estate speculation. Gentrification often involves
the intentional "redlining" of neighborhoods: strategic disinvestment in
existing communities that allows them to decay and depopulate, with
the effect that buildings later can be purchased cheaply, rehabilitated,
and sold for profit to other groups. In Bramwell's work, maintenance —
rather than development — is used to incite progress and encourage
Harlem residents to call for change in their own communities, for
themselves. Bramwell's take on the act of maintenance resonates with
Ukeles's manifesto: his impact is progressive. Instead of attempting
to impose radical change or to develop social programs for the urban
ghetto, Bramwell simply cleaned, drawing attention to the power of
maintenance systems and the social consequences of their breakdown.
While Bramwell's labor is physical, Pilvi Takala's labor is decidedly
more white collar. Like Ukeles and Bramwell, Takala enters into a com-
munity as an outsider, yet she uses her exterior position to critique the
group rather than to lift it up. Working under the guise of a trainee
in the marketing department at Deloitte consulting and business ser-
vices in Helsinki in The Trainee (2008), Takala challenges the corporate
structure of human development. During her monthlong "training,"
Takala either appears not to be working, or pursues a series of banal
tasks and "busywork," both of which are readily noticed by her cowork-
ers, of whom only a few know her real project. In time-lapse videos, the
16 VICTORIA ROGERS
Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation with letter, key card, PowerPoint presenta-
tion, office furniture, video; dimensions variable. Still from video
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT
17
artist is shown partaking in various common office situations: sitting in
a cubicle, riding the elevator up and down the building, and photocopy-
ing. When colleagues question her activity, or lack thereof, she replies
with some form of the phrase "I'm working," claiming her intellectual
labor as office work. In so doing, Takala subverts traditional demands of
workplace production, neglecting to pair her intellectual work with the
requisite patterns of paper-pushing and computer activity to which her
coworkers are accustomed. Takala introduces a break into the workflow
at Deloitte and challenges viewers to question the systems on display
there. As her colleagues grow increasingly frustrated with her apparent
inactivity, they are powerless to do anything to stop her. The Trainee
uncovers the daily work of keeping operations and technology systems
moving and simultaneously questions whether these systems are as effi-
cient as they seem. Takala extends Ukeles's practice by using mainten-
ance activity as a form of commentary on the corporate workplace, and
expands beyond Ukeles's purview by calling attention to maintenance
practices in the business-services sector.
Takala's work tangibly demonstrates the repetitive labor of mainten-
ance that Ukeles articulates in her manifesto. In Takala's videos, the
passage of time becomes the subject in addition to the artist herself.
While Bramwell's sweeps emphasize the care inherent to mainten-
ance, Takala emphasizes repetition and duration. In one of the series
of time-lapse videos that comprise The Trainee, Takala is shown let-
ting time pass without a computer on her desk — what she refers to in
the video, February 25, a Day at Consulting (2008), as thinking "without
the machine," while her coworkers buzz around her, enacting progress
throughout the office. Takala's maintenance is that of the mind. Her
lack of production increasingly agitates her colleagues, who write email
to one another and suggestively give Takala computer-based assign-
ments to complete.
The visualization of maintenance in The Trainee is twofold: Takala
engages in intellectual maintenance and critiques her colleagues who
partake in a system of workplace maintenance. The videos provoke
questions about the materiality of that difference. While Takala seems
to be refusing to produce or refusing to develop, her colleagues seem
to be miming development, more concerned with Takala's inactivity
and chatting with one another than anything else, posing as if they are
18 VICTORIA ROGERS
making progress in the workplace. Her coworkers are participants in
a constant system of corporate maintenance, filling a series of cyclical
roles at Deloitte. The repetitive nature of the larger corporate system in
which these employees operate is hidden beneath the constant shuffling
of paper and clicking of computer keys, recalling the embarrassment or
shame Ukeles often cites as synonymous with maintenance systems, the
work that "no one will talk about."'5 The Trainee draws out systems of
maintenance that are disguised as systems of development. Her cowork-
ers mask their maintenance activities under the claim of development,
relying on symbols of office productivity, such as computer operations
and brief discussions with colleagues, to validate their work. In one of
the films, a coworker chats with another, an act seemingly no more eco-
nomically productive than Takala's mental labor.
Bramwell and Takala draw out the relationship between mainten-
ance and development which Ukeles brings to light, further challeng-
ing a simple binary and extending it to new communities and beyond
purely physical labor. They recontextualize Ukeles's maintenance prac-
tice within contemporary issues of shared public space and modern
office culture while building on core components of Ukeles's work:
drawing attention to undervalued, unacknowledged, and excluded
types of physical and intellectual maintenance. Bramwell and Takala
each also demonstrate how maintenance systems can alter society. As
Butler shows, acts of maintenance straddle the line between public and
private space and support the capacity of bodies to collectively call for
change. Maintenance is usually associated with the status quo, but as
Butler, Occupy Wall Street, and Ukeles all attest, it is already part of
a political process that distributes power and labor in certain ways. By
highlighting both the physical maintenance needed to occupy space and
the psychological maintenance needed to sustain a movement, they each
point to the essential role maintenance plays in political processes and
even in revolution itself.
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT 19
Notes
i Judith Butler, "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street," in
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg
McLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 128.
2 David Chen, "Protesters Told to Vacate Park, for Its Cleaning," New
York Times, October 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/nyregion/
protesters-told-they-will-have-to-leave-zuccotti-park-temporarily.html.
3 See "Emergency Call to Action: Keep Bloomberg and Kelly from
Evicting #OWS," Occupy Wall Street website, October 13, 2011, http://
occupywallst.org/article/emergency-call-action-prevent-forcible-closure-
occ/; and Anemona Hartocollis, "Facing Eviction, Protesters Begin Park
Cleanup," New York Times, October 13, 2011, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes
.com/2011/10/13/told-to-leave-protesters-talk-pre-emptive-strategy/. When the
Zuccotti occupation was forcibly evicted in the middle of the night the fol-
lowing month, the Bloomberg administration continued to justify clearing
the park with the rhetoric of cleaning, "restoring," health, and safety. See Al
Baker and Joseph Goldstein, "After an Earlier Misstep, a Minutely Planned
Raid," New York Times, November 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/
20ii/n/i6/nyregion/police-clear-zuccotti-park-with-show-of-force-bright-
lights-and-loudspeakers.html; and James Barron and Colin Moynihan, "City
Reopens Park after Protesters Are Evicted," New York Times, November
15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-
zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html.
4 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition, 'Care'" (1969), reproduced in this volume, pp.
118— 121.
5 Ukeles's manifesto challenges a traditional Kantian definition of artistic
practice. In the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant advances a definition of
artistic production that continues to have traction today. For Kant, beauty in
art depends on an object produced by genius. The object's beauty rests primarily
on its originality and secondarily on its worth for emulation. Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2005), sec. 46, 113.
6 Sherry Buckberrough and Andrea Miller-Keller, Mierle Laderman
Ukeles: Matrix ijj (exhibition catalogue) (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth
Atheneum, 1998), 2.
7 Samantha C. Earl, "The Tilted Trajectory of Public Art: New York City
1979-2005" (MA thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011), 56.
8 Helen Molesworth, "House Work and Art Work," October 92, Spring
2000, 78.
9 In a discussion of binary oppositions, Jacques Derrida refers to the
"interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive
emergence of a new 'concept.'" In other words, the reversal of a hierarchical
opposition is not limited to making the formerly dominant term secondary,
20 VICTORIA ROGERS
but can instead create an altogether new relationship between the two terms.
Jacques Derrida, "Positions," in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 42.
10 See Michael H. Miller, "Trash Talk: The Department of Sanitation's
Artist in Residence Is a Real Survivor," GalleristNY, January 15, 2013, http://
galleristny.com/2013/01/trash-talk-the-department-of-sanitations-artist-in-
residence-is-a-real-survivor/.
11 Andrea Hamilton, "Artist Sweeps Hallway in an Effort to Cleanse
Spirits," Daily News, September 22, 1995, 2-B.
12 Timothy Williams, "Mixed Feelings as Change Overtakes 125th St.,"
New York Times, June 13, 2008.
13 H. Lanier Hickman, American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste
Management in the United States (Santa Barbara: Forester Press, 2003), 520.
14 Hamilton.
15 Miller.
MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT 21
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object, 1973. Performance
view, c. 7,500, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, July 20, 1973. Part of the
Maintenance Art Performance series
MAINTENANCE, RENEWAL,
DECAY, DEATH, AIR, TIME,
DUST, AND THE GALLERY
Andrea Neustein
I. Interpretation Is Maintenance
Art handling, preservation, and restoration are a few of the various
forms of work that comprise the maintenance of art. ("Art" here can
refer both to the field as a whole, as well as to a single artwork or multi-
ple artworks). Other instruments of art maintenance include the varied
frameworks that surround art: exhibition spaces and galleries, econo-
mies in which art circulates, intellectual property law, social art-events,
online art image-aggregators and blogs, the so-called art world, and the
art exhibition. The interpretation of art — specifically, the work done by
curators and arguably to a decreasing extent by critics and also view-
ers— can also maintain art. These physical spaces, discourses, roles, and
tasks all serve their own maintenance functions, while being themselves
continually maintained, an issue to which I'll return later. Let's accept
for the moment that the curator is a maintenance worker, laboring in
service of the continued existence of art.
II. The Violence of Interpretation (Change)
The idea that interpretation maintains art, and that curating and criti-
cism are therefore maintenance practices, may seem to suggest that
interpretation is essential to the continued existence of meaning in art.
In fact, quite the opposite is true.
23
ff1' .*t" .
In Karin Sander's Wallpiece series (1994-ongoing), the artist moistens
and burnishes bare gallery walls until their bright surfaces are perfectly
smooth and glossy. Masaru Iwai similarly mobilizes the instruments
of interior or domestic maintenance — household cleaners — to burnish,
scrub, and sand interior surfaces of exhibition spaces until the varnish
on wood floors has cracked and walls have been reduced to powder.
The outcomes of each artist's actions are nearly opposite: in Sander's
case, the wall itself becomes an aestheticized object for viewing, while
in Iwai's case the space is destroyed. Yet both practices demonstrate the
tendency of maintenance work to change the nature of the objects and
systems upon which it acts.
Perhaps interpretation does to art what Iwai does to the wooden
floor: works it and works it until its basic qualities have been unrecog-
nizably, irreparably altered.
In this way, like any act of love, maintenance is both a violent and
affectionate act.
But I am getting ahead of myself. We should start with Duchamp.
III. Dust Breeding — To Be Respected
Dust Breeding was perhaps the first artwork to engage self-consciously
with questions of art maintenance. In 1920, Man Ray photographed
the surface of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, which Duchamp had
set on sawhorses next to his studio window with a sign on the wall
that read, "Dust Breeding. To be respected."1 The work had collected a
thick layer of dust that in the photograph appears almost topographi-
cal. Both the studio installation and the photograph of Dust Breeding
raise several key points: Duchamp introduces the lazy artist, the artist
who refuses to work, and hence a poetics of refusal.2 This refusal in turn
points to its opposite: the labor-intensive work, and thus the artwork 's
identity not as a sublime object, but as a fallible thing that needs to
be consciously and consistently maintained by human labor in order to
survive. Dust Breeding, then, is an important precursor to the work of
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who nearly fifty years later explicitly proposes
"maintenance art" in her 1969 manifesto.' In Transfer: Maintenance of an
Art Object (1973), one of Ukeles's four famous "maintenance activities"
performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973, the artist called her
24 ANDREA NEUSTEIN
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920, printed c. 1967. Gelatin silver print,
9 7/16 x 12 in. (23.9 x 30.4 cm)
-**
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY
25
act of dusting a vitrine that holds a female mummy a "dust painting."
Helen Molesworth points out that in this single act of cleaning, Ukeles
conflates three jobs into one: that of the janitor, who was responsible for
cleaning the vitrine up until Ulceles's action; that of the artist; and that
of the professional art worker, in this case the conservator, whose ser-
vices have to be enlisted once the vitrine's status is publically "elevated"
by the artist from display environment to art object.4
Similarly, Dust Breeding can be seen as the first artwork that pro-
poses maintenance work — or the refusal to enact maintenance — as a
specifically artistic proposition and realm of concern, "to be respected."
As Molesworth acknowledges, Duchamp's making of Dust Breeding
precludes him from making any progress on the Large Glass, which is
temporarily repurposed as the breeding ground.5 Molesworth calls this
Duchamp's "insurgency" against his role of artist-as-worker, but it is
a passive insurgency, more like a strike with no negotiable terms.6 By
declining to work on the art object and shifting the viewer's focus from
the work of genius to the record of idleness, Duchamp and Man Ray
stage both refusal and refuse.
If we are to relate Dust Breeding to interpretation considered as an
entropic force, it might be helpful to take a look at Duchamp's own ideas
about art and interpretation. In a 1959 interview with Calvin Tompkins,
Duchamp says:
There is nothing that has eternal value .... The poor Mona Lisa is
gone because no matter howwonderful her smile maybe, it's been
looked at so much that the smile has disappeared. I believe that
when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing
by looking alone. Physically. See what I mean? They change the
physical image without knowing it. There is an action, transcen-
dental of course, that absolutely destroys whatever you could see
when it was alive .... [It deteriorates. Sometimes it's an embel-
lishment .... But I will go further and say that there is a physical
action of the onlookers. The onlooker is part of the making of the
painting but also exerts a diabolical influence by looking alone.
Duchamp goes on to say that looking can also revive an artwork (El
Greco's paintings, coming back into vogue at the time of the interview,
are cited as an example), but that after too much looking the work will go
dormant again. Given Duchamp's ideas about the cyclical life and death
of the artwork in relation to looking, the dust in Dust Breeding might
26 ANDREA NEUSTEIN
even function allegorically. With interpretation, the artwork is revived
but already begins to be irreparably changed to the point that its former
meaning is destroyed by new meanings; it "deteriorates." Without inter-
pretation, the work may survive; it is not destroyed, but it lies dormant
(under a growing layer of dust) and loses its vitality — until it is revived
again. Besides pointing out the viewer's power to destroy the artwork
simply by looking, it is relevant that in Dust Breeding Duchamp grants
the dust if not agency then at least some kind of animism. The dust, too,
acts upon the artwork.
As Robert Barry wrote in Art Work (1970), a conceptual art piece
from his Meta-Concepts series, "Knowing of it changes it."
IV. Hans Haacke
Maintenance is renewal, or perhaps a covert or unwitting act of creation.
Maybe decay and death too provide a pathway for an object to come into
its full power — perhaps the afterlife of an object takes precedence over
its life. Take, for example, Hans Haacke 's Germania (1993), in which the
artist famously tore up the white marble floors of the German pavilion
at the Venice Biennale, which had been constructed in 1909 but altered
in 1938 under the Third Reich. Haacke 's act is the proactive, accelerated
iteration of Duchamp's Large Glass, upon which time acts organically.
I asked Haacke in a casual conversation: did you sell the rubble? Did
anyone keep it?
"I don't know if anyone kept it. To sell it would have been absurd,"
Haacke said.
The act of breaking up the floor may perform its intended function:
that is to say, Haacke 's act may contest the pavilion's symbolic power.
Haacke is clearly aware that this act of breakage transforms the floor
into a spectacle of a destroyed regime. Still, Haacke unwittingly rec-
ognizes the floor in this act of principled destruction. The floor's sym-
bolic power is elevated through its negation, in the Hegelian sense of
Aufhebung or sublation. If a contractor had decided a cement floor would
be aesthetically preferable, or an engineer had removed it for reasons of
leveling, then maybe the floor would truly be destroyed. However, by
rendering the act of its destruction visible as an artwork, Haacke fixes
the floor's symbolic power for posterity. This is particularly true now
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY 27
in a way that Haacke could not have anticipated in 1993: any online
search of the work's title serves up hundreds of images of the broken
monument as a decontextualized icon. Although its image survives, in
fairness Haacke expressed no desire to preserve the physical floor for
posterity as an artwork after the close of the Biennale.
At the same Biennale, Ilya Kabakov and Emilia Kabakov's Red
Pavilion similarly critiqued the history of the political bodies represented
by the architectural structure in which they worked. The Kabakovs uti-
lized the passive language of refusal, requesting that the maintenance
staff on the Biennale grounds refrain from restoring the pavilion build-
ing in the months and days leading up to the fair, as was the usual
preparatory process. The Russian pavilion has an open archway as its
entrance and the interior had been filled with haphazardly stored lum-
ber and detritus that had accumulated a thick layer of dust and cobwebs
since the Biennale had closed two years earlier. Rather than a David-
and-Goliath iconography — the unlikely heroic gesture — the Kabakovs
expressed their critique by just not cleaning up.
So: it's no big news at this point that looking and interpreting changes
the thing itself, the artwork, or perhaps destroys it. But then how can
interpretation be considered maintenance? Doesn't maintenance in its
essence mean to keep things as they are in the present, to maintain the
status quo, deriving as it does from the Latin manu tenere, to hold in
hand?
V.The Heisenberg Principle of Maintenance; Time in Relation to
Decay and Death
All maintenance changes the thing itself. Holding something in hand
is to have already lifted away, to have removed, to have changed.
Interpretation is not the exception to this rule.
Does valuing maintenance, as proposed by Ukeles, imply that the
status quo should be maintained? The question involves a confusion of
tenses. Maintenance does not maintain a thing as it is in the present. It
seeks to restore a thing to the way it was in the past. Take the example of
the glass vitrine. The vitrine becomes dusty and promises to get dustier.
The maintenance worker sprays it with glass cleaner and wipes the dust
off. To actually maintain the vitrine as the worker finds it in the pres-
*'" • .28 .v v.---. . ■ V-. . „■■" • ANDREA NEUSTEIN
ent would be to allow the dust to sit, like Duchamp did. Instead, the
worker seeks to return the vitrine to its previous state. Why? What the
worker is in fact maintaining is not the present of the vitrine (what is
held in hand), but the past of the vitrine. In other words, the worker
maintains the ideal or purpose of the vitrine. Why does the vitrine
exist? The worker argues, through the glass cleaner, that the vitrine
exists in order that the viewer can look at an object protected within
it. Maintenance actors argue through their actions for the purpose
of the thing they are maintaining. Does cleaning necessarily require
Platonism? In the case of the vitrine, the object's purpose as a display
environment whose transparency is paramount to its performance is not
particularly contentious — until Ukeles appears and declares its cleaning
an artwork and that it is to be cleaned only by a conservator from then
on. Cleaning the object, as uncontroversial as it may be, still argues for
the ideal of the object upon which maintenance acts and the conditions
it seeks to maintain or create. In short, yes, maintenance requires a cer-
tain Platonism.
The status quo as we experience it involves perpetual decay. The real-
ity of the status quo is not absolutely static but includes constant entropy
and ongoing breakdown; this decay is met with repeated repairs, in a
seemingly desperate pretense of integrity or immortality. Maintenance
seeks to "fix" in both senses of the word: to repair, and to fasten securely.
Since this is impossible, however, the maintainer unwittingly seizes
upon select elements of that which is maintained to the exclusion of
others, maintaining those elements vigorously, potentially overworking
them to a grotesque degree.
Maintenance is guerilla warfare against the status quo. By obscur-
ing the constant cycle of breakdown and upkeep, maintenance creates
a pretense of consistency and proffers the pristine and new as the status
quo. In her "Manifesto for Maintenance Art," Ukeles defiantly names
"maintenance art" and claims as an artist her right to perform house-
work, child care, hygiene, and later, sanitation work, garbage collec-
tion, and any act of public or private upkeep, as art. The manifesto is
an argument for visibility, both of the maintenance worker and of the
woman-artist's dual and, Ukeles felt at the time, opposite roles as main-
tainer and creator. In the manifesto, Ukeles categorizes maintenance as
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY 29
part of "the Life Instinct." An individualized framework and a push for
progress characterize the death instinct; the life instinct, in contrast, is
a push for unification and equilibrium — the imperative is to "preserve
the new."7 By staging upkeep, Ukeles showcases a world of perpetual
decay and suggests a role for people in constantly renewing that world.
The word renew suggests repetition {re-, "again, anew," or a movement
backwards) but also suggests invention {new), implying a pure creation.
How can something be new, again? Renewal differs from the cheer-
ful conjecture that a recently cleaned object is "like new"; instead, the
renewed object is new.
VI. Death and the Curator; Space = Time
Ploughed fields depict figures of duration every bit as clearly as figures of
space; they show us the rhythm of human toil.
Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration
Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an
individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state.
Time, they say, is the water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar
drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.
Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain
If the banality of ongoing breakdown is to be expected, then mainten-
ance is interference and an insistence on a desired status quo. If, further,
maintenance can be an unwitting way of making, in an almost appropri-
ative capacity, then it can also be a covert way of changing: an invention
of fixed history disguised as the ongoing present, criticality that looks
like affirmation, the cable guy running wire, the cellphone hack.8 In a
basic way, if maintenance is the struggle against decay, it must implic-
itly attempt to work against death, as Ukeles hints in the discussion
of "the Life Instinct" in her manifesto. Acknowledging maintenance
accepts that it takes work to remain alive, that time inevitably undoes
our maintenance labor, that our continued existence is conditional and
relies upon our own and others' work, and that our comfort is contin-
gent on the invisibility of that work.
30 ANDREA NEUSTEIN
What does the invisible struggle against death and time have to do
with the art maintenance worker: the curator, the viewer, the critic, the
art handler, or the preservationist? According to Bachelard and Mann,
space can somehow function or act upon us in a manner analogous to
time, and our perception of space can even represent time and affect our
experience of its passage or stagnation. If this is the case, both space
and time may be successfully manipulated or, within limits, controlled.
Henri-Pierre Roche said that Duchamp's finest work was his use of
time. Perhaps, then, the curator and other maintenance workers are
more than clever morticians.
The art worker's relationship with space may be analogous to the
maintenance worker's relationship with time. The space of the exhi-
bition is meant to be nonporous, climate-controlled, timeless: a haven
for the protection of art. As Miwon Kwon acknowledges in her essay
on Ukeles and the maintenance of the exhibition space, these charac-
teristics "are foundational to the institution's self-definition and self-
justification."" Of course, at this art-historical moment, we as viewers
have already accepted that when sanctioned by an artist or even a certain
kind of curator, a delineated interaction with the space is permissible
and that the space is subject to interrogation. A delicate acknowledg-
ment of one's surroundings is met with recognition and approval. After
the exhibition, however, the space is expected to "resume" its pristine
state: invisible workers putty and paint the holes in the wall, sweep up
the installation, pack the artworks, remove the projector, and reinstall
the lights. The space goes blank, so it can again be endowed with the
character of one author or another. The gallery represents an unusu-
ally explicit embodiment of the maintenance ideal, the realized fiction
of static space and time. Sander's Wallpiece relies on and disturbs our
expectations of a "neutral" exhibition space, simply by continuing the
usually unnoticeable maintenance work on our surroundings until its
effects aestheticize the very blankness that we take as a given. (You want
a sanded wall? Here is your precious sanded wall).
Accepted wisdom has it that the curator-as-art-worker maintains the
hallowed symbolic neutrality of the exhibition space, in order that art
situated within it may be viewed in an optimal fashion. Within this
model, Boris Groys, echoing Duchamp, posits that "the work of art is
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY 31
sick, helpless; in order to see it viewers must be brought to it as visitors
are brought to a bed-ridden patient by hospital staff. It is no coincidence
that the word 'curator' is etymologically related to 'cure': to curate is to
cure." To cure the space is to cure the artwork, then. Groys continues,
however, that curating functions "like a pharmakon in the Derridean
sense: it both cures the image and further contributes to its illness."10.
Perhaps it is in this account of the curatorial role as the pharmakon
of the artwork that we can reconcile Ukeles's idea of maintenance as
the life instinct with the concurrent reality of maintenance as a kind of
destructive idealization, a kind of fixing as death instinct. This requires
a somewhat embarrassing, new-agey acknowledgment of the cyclical,
cooperative relationship between life and death.
The emergence of conceptual and installation art in the latter half of
the twentieth century proposed that an exhibition could take as its sub-
ject not individual, autonomous objects but the dialogue between art-
works in space. If this dialogue takes place in the space between objects,
then the subject of the exhibition is space: blank wall, air, concep-
tual divide. "One can say that objects and events are organized by an
installation space like individual words and verbs are organized by a
sentence."" Curators might intend to maintain the original, founda-
tional meaning of an artwork when they are actually writing a new (life
or death) sentence.
VII. A Brief Note on Dust and "the Market"
The curatorial threat may be waning, of course, as the exhibition space
is reproduced in the virtual realm and replaced by the economic space
of the "art market."12 When the art collector, auction house, or private
dealer moves artworks through this inconceivable space, it dematerial-
izes them while maintaining them as valuable items. Even artists believe
in the market. Spanish artist Karmelo Bermejo's Fiscal Canvas (2013) is
a square of stretched linen embroidered with the phrase "undeclared
income," the buyer of which is obliged not to declare the acquisition,
while the seller must not declare the sale. The work thus cancels its own
existence in the market, the art world's space of reality. Jacob Kassay,
acknowledging his own prominent position in the art market, recently
showed a series of his recognizable and valuable silver paintings at
32 ANDREA NEUSTEIN
Galerie Art: Concept in Paris, but declared in the press release that the
works would not be for sale. Exhibiting them thus negates their "exis-
tence" in the realm of the market.
Much has been made of "the archive" as the realm of the artist-as-
researcher, as something to be cited by the critically self-aware, indexi-
cal artwork. But what of the department of conservation? The Salvage
Art Institute, Elka Krajewska's project with art insurance company
AX A, is a collection of works that have been declared damaged beyond
repair and seized by the insurance company; the works therefore have
zero value and are stripped of their authorship. Yet when Krajewska
exhibits the works, they are shown as the Salvage Art Institute collec-
tion, where they are collected rather than appropriated. Their original
authorship is noted in a wall text that mimics the labeling language
used by the insurers. They are broken artworks, zero-value artworks,
discarded artworks, then, but artworks still, and they manage to func-
tion outside of the market.
Apart from damaged works or works circulating outside the market,
perhaps dust is the most recent frontier for critical art. A lot of the artists
who think about maintenance seem particularly concerned with dust.
For Duchamp, dust breeds and it has a kind of productive autonomy.
For Ukeles, dust is circumstantial but central, a medium through which
maintenance art can be enacted. Throughout his practice, Sam Lewitt
pits the means through which history and information are produced
against the obsolescence of their varied material embodiments, pointing
out the precariousness of information technology and perhaps the unre-
liability of its contents.'3 In his Test Subjects (2010), objects with reflec-
tive surfaces, such as a helicopter pilot's helmet or an Ikea mirror, are
sprayed with nonarchival photomount and coated in "Arizona test dust,"
a manufactured dust (it can be acquired in various grades such as Ai
ultrafine or A4 coarse) used to test machinery and military equipment
in extreme environmental conditions. Relying on the viewer's associa-
tion of dust with age and the authority of historical narrative, Lewitt
proffers the objects through a visual and conceptual slight of hand. Not
only are the objects newly bought, but the dust itself, the patina of nos-
talgia, is also a recently manufactured approximation, a simulation of
"real" dust. The work is further complicated by its built-in obsolescence:
the photomount is a nonarchival adhesive, and as the work ages and the
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY 33
. '. -. -.'.-■, .... • .* />■ i* % ■
photomount weakens, the dust presumably will drop off the surface and
the object will become cleaner.
If space and time are invisible and generalized phenomena, then dust
is particular. Space and time are forceful; dust is gentle, but insistent.
Dust, in its visible-invisible omnipresence, its innately democratic char-
acter, gives the impression of a kind of universal intimacy. Dust is the
symbolic particularization of death in life. "It is simply the veil of obliv-
ion, the membrane of neglect."'4 Dust breeding: deathly, but generative.
34
ANDREA NEUSTEIN
Notes
i According to Duchamp's friend, artist and author Henri-Pierre Roche:
"Very large plates of glass were resting on trestles ... This was The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors. Parts of it were cleared off. Others were covered with
varying thicknesses of dust. A sign read: Dust Breeding. To be respected . . . ."
Henri-Pierre Roche as quoted in Caroline Cros, Marcel Duchamp (London:
Reaktion Books, 2006), 116.
2 I borrow the phrase "poetics of refusal" from Nicolas Guagnini.
3 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition, 'Care,'" reproduced in this catalogue, pp. 118-121.
On the relation of Ukeles to Duchamp's refusal to work, see Helen Molesworth,
"Work Stoppages: Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Theory of Labor Value," Documents
10, Fall 1977, 19-22. On Ukeles's work in relation to gallery spaces in particu-
lar, see Miwon Kwon, "In Appreciation of Invisible Work: Mierle Laderman
Ukeles and the Maintenance of the 'White Cube,'" Documents 10, Fall 1977,
15-18.
4 Molesworth, 20-21. Ukeles herself spells out these three roles in doc-
umentation for Transfer, see Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Maintenance Art
Activity (1973)," Documents 10, Fall 1977, 8.
5 "It's hard to work on a painting that you've deliberately allowed to gather
dust." Molesworth, 22.
6 Ibid.
7 Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!" 118.
8 A potentially helpful illustration of the concept of maintenance worker
as invisible revolutionary or critical voice is the Brett Ratner movie Tower Heist
(2011), in which a motley crew of maintenance workers in a luxury condo —
a concierge, an elevator operator, a doorman, a maid, and a receptionist —
use their built-in invisibility to reclaim a stolen pension fund from a Bernie
Madoff-like Ponzi-scheming villain.
9 Kwon, "In Appreciation of Invisible Work."
10 Boris Groys, "Politics of Installation," E-J lux Journal 2, January 2009,
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-installation/.
11 Boris Groys, "Introduction — Global Conceptualism Revisited," E-flux
Journal 29, November 2011, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/introduction
— global-conceptualism-revisited/.
12 Most young artists I know look at the installation-shot aggregating web-
site Contemporary Art Daily more frequently than they see artwork in galler-
ies, let alone on studio visits.
13 For example, in his Fluid Employment installation in the 2012 Whitney
Biennial, Lewitt laid out magnetized computer components coated in ferro-
magnetic fluid, generally used to lubricate mechanisms within a computer, on
a plastic tarp. The magnetic liquid clung to the metal parts in sea-urchin-like
formations that undulated in shifting air currents from rotating desk fans. The
MAINTENANCE AND THE GALLERY 35
highly unstable liquid had to be replenished every ten days or so. After fulfill-
ing his duties, the artist would leave the used bottles in various states of fullness
scattered throughout the installation.
14 Joris-Karl Huysmans, The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (London: Penguin
Classics, 2001), 24-25.
36 ANDREA NEUSTEIN
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Ukeles is sitting at a table with workers from the New York City Department of Sanitation
MAINTENANCE AND
DEPENDENCY
Nina Horisaki-Christens
During the 2012 presidential campaign, a heated debate broke out
between Republicans and Democrats around the terms by which
President Obama qualified the achievements of entrepreneurs and
small-business owners. Spurred on by the Republican convention's
choice of the theme "We Built It" as a response to Obama's comment
"You didn't build that," the debate centered on the perceived auton-
omy of entrepreneurs. While Republicans took an individualist stance
that cited the ingenuity and perseverance of entrepreneurs, the point
that Obama and the Democrats tried to make is that even small, indi-
vidual ventures still rely on infrastructures, services, and grants from
local and federal governments in order to achieve success.1 By negat-
ing the individual's claim to full and complete credit for the success
of the business he or she founded, Obama invoked the myriad social
support networks — roads, fire and police services, education, tax breaks
and incentives, and so on — that cleared the ground for entrepreneurs
to start their businesses. Such a claim angered conservatives because it
directly contradicts the fantasy of the self-determining, self-sufficient,
liberated subject inherited from Enlightenment thought — it contradicts
the claims of individuality so dear to American thought. However, such
an argument does not necessarily deny difference and individuality, but
reframes the image of society to recognize the interdependence of indi-
vidual citizens and the political, economic, and cultural systems that we
so often describe in ghettoizing terms.
39
This interdependence is also constantly linked to maintenance, the
set of actions and systems that support life. When maintaining those
other persons, systems, living things, or objects we need for the con-
tinuation of life and livelihood, maintenance can illustrate existing rela-
tionships of dependency — after all, that on which we rely for life must
be kept in good working order. In "Sanitation Manifesto!" (1984), artist
Mierle Laderman Ukeles explores such connections between mainten-
ance and dependency when she claims that "we are, all of us whether we
desire it or not, in relation to Sanitation, implicated, dependent — if we
want the City, and ourselves, to last more than a few days."2 As Ukeles
implies, living both hastens the processes of entropy and makes us reli-
ant on maintenance activities and workers to hold those processes at bay.
Similarly, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift write in their analysis of
the place of maintenance in the contemporary social order, "the world
is involved in a continuous dying that can only be fended off by con-
stant repair and maintenance."3 We depend on the sanitation worker,
the office maintenance staff, the nurse, or the mother in order to create a
space that can support public discourse, cultural production, commerce,
and exchange. In turn, these workers rely on their communities, clients,
and social structures to support them as they fulfill their duties. These
cycles of need and dependency show the centrality of maintenance
workers, and by extension maintenance activities, to our social fabric.
Maintenance is generally characterized as a conservative action,
aimed at warding off the entropic forces that would render us immobile,
shelterless, unable to communicate, and subject to disease and pesti-
lence. Ukeles herself initially describes maintenance as "direct feedback
systems with little room for change."4 In fact, Ukeles questions and
rethinks this understanding of maintenance tasks: she seeks out the
creative potential within the limited terms on which maintenance func-
tions, redefining the creative act to include something less like produc-
tion and more akin to process. It is in the doing of the task that one
can find one's voice. Graham and Thrift also support this point when
they argue that "maintenance and repair can itself be a vital source of
variation, improvisation, and innovation." For example, a repair need
not restore something to its original form, but can also alter something
to avoid the need for such repairs in the future. They go on to posit
that "seen in this light, 'maintenance is learning.'"5 This conceptual
40 NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS
inversion — the shift from maintenance as enforcer of the status quo to
maintenance as generator of knowledge and improvement — resembles
Ukeles's claim that, as opposed to the system of sanitation that is under-
valued, disdained, or rigidly subordinated in a hierarchical relationship
with the rest of society, sanitation as action implies equality. Society
cannot function without the clearing of space and disposal of waste
that sanitation provides. And the fact that those who do the work of
sanitation must serve all members of that society, regardless of class,
means that "sanitation, in democracy, implies the possibility of a public-
social-contract operating laterally, not upstairs-downstairs, but equally
between the servers and the served."6 Seen in this light, maintenance
activities can be understood as generative, productive forces that create
the space for life and liberty, clearing the ground — in a multiplicity of
senses — for a pluralistic and vital public sphere.
Much like Ukeles's claim that the networks formed by sanitation
create equivalences of need that imply equality, Eva Feder Kittay argues
for the idea of an equality based on dependency, rather than one based
on individual character and "voluntarily chosen obligations assumed for
mutual benefit and self-interest." This equality is based not on individu-
als but on the connections between them. While many of these connec-
tions are unequal, with one party holding greater power or greater need
in the specific relationship between the two, Kittay 's point is that all of
us to some degree or another are caught in some form of dependency
relationship: dependency is an inescapable state, universal at the same
time that it forges social and ethical connections. This is not so when
we consider a model based on voluntarily chosen obligations, which
assumes that equality is based on the productive contributions of all
members of society, inherently leaving out those members who cannot
contribute productively. The question shifts from, What my are rights as
an equal? to "What are my responsibilities to others with whom I stand
in specific relations and what are the responsibilities of others to me, so
that I can be well cared for and have my needs addressed even as I care
for and respond to the needs of those who depend on me?"7
Clearly, Kittay 's rethinking of dependency and equality also involves
a shift from the language of rights to that of responsibilities. As Kittay
points out in relation to John Rawls's conception of primary goods, the
problem with a discussion of rights is that it presupposes a set of ideal-
jfij' '. -■ .;■-, -MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY ♦". .. 41
ized individuals equally capable of both claiming their rights and shoul-
dering the burden of social cooperation, a situation that is applicable to
neither those who require extensive care nor those who care for them.
Those who require care — whether young, ill, elderly, or disabled —
cannot be assumed to be capable of voicing their rights nor of contrib-
uting equally to systems of social cooperation. Likewise, care workers
must often subordinate their own personal rights and their contributions
to greater society to their responsibility both to care for, and to represent
the rights of, their charges.8 If we shift instead to a discussion of respon-
sibilities, we open up a space for recognizing the responsibility of the
whole of society to the dependent individual, a responsibility to secure
our individual rights when we become incapacitated. The recognition
of this responsibility also acknowledges the care worker as a stand-
in for the responsibilities of the greater society, which should afford
those workers compensation equivalent to this role. In other words,
such a shift recognizes that society depends on those who care for the
young, has a moral responsibility to care for the elderly and disabled,
and should promise access to equality for all citizens. It also recognizes
that we all have needs to be met and meeting those needs is not simply
a personal responsibility but one that falls on society. In the words of
Judith Butler,
We cannot presume the enclosed and well-fed space of the polis,
where all the material needs are somehow being taken care of
elsewhere by beings whose gender, race, or status render them
ineligible for public recognition. Rather, we have to not only bring
the material urgencies of the body into the [public] square, but to
make those needs central to the demands of politics."
While Kittay's argument was confined to a consideration of care work-
ers and their charges, Butler's comments suggest the essential nature of
our dependency on others. The pursuit of equality requires responsibil-
ity for each other's needs in all relationships throughout society, even
among those who are more able bodied.
The recognition of dependency serves as an underlying, motivating
force in Ukeles's practice, focused as it is on redefining maintenance
as art. Her initial impetus for developing a concept of maintenance as
art came from her experiences as an artist and new mother. Told by a
mentor that she could not be both a mother and an artist, and finding
42 NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS
**
that her labors as a new mother were constantly dismissed in conversa-
tion with her friends and colleagues, she felt it necessary to make that
work of caring — the work of mothering — into an artistic practice, in
order to recognize its value, its conceptual weight, and its creativity. She
likened the work of maintenance to process art and first documented
it as performance in Maintenance Art Tasks (1973). This photographic
album contains a series of snapshots recording the procedures of main-
tenance activities in all their duration and complexity: washing dishes,
sorting and cleaning the laundry, changing diapers, accompanying kids
to a doctor's checkup, washing and polishing a car, filling a dumpster
with construction debris, and getting a haircut. By equating her own
actions (doing the laundry, changing diapers) with those of paid labor-
ers (washing and polishing cars, moving construction debris), she chal-
lenges the status of care work as unworthy of acknowledgement as work
ind ascribes greater value to those actions. At the same time, by docu-
menting the work in obsessive detail, she conveys a sense of duration,
making the process of this often hidden, generally domestic work vis-
ible and tangible. She simultaneously claims this work as art through a
conceptual turn that bears a striking resemblance to works such as Vito
Acconci's Blinking Piece (1969), in which photo documentation from
the performer's perspective redefines a daily action as a performance.
Through her art and writings, including Maintenance Art Tasks, Ukeles
argues that the value of maintenance must be acknowledged, and since
a key part of its value is its indispensability — in other words, our depen-
dence on it — she makes a case for the recognition of our dependencies.
However, this attempt to alter the view of care work remains within
the realm of advocacy, situated as it is within a feminist context seek-
ing to reposition care workers, who are predominantly women, within
the social hierarchy and thereby to claim agency for women. The goal
of providing the maintenance worker, including the domestic worker,
I with greater recognition, appreciation, and equality, while laudable,
I does not question the power dynamics implicit within care work or the
' problematics in the activity of maintaining something. Maintaining a
1 system or body is not inherently selfless and can become restrictive and
manipulative when applied as an oppressive system or to a body in pain.10
The often unequal relationships of dependency created in care work also
contain the potential for abuse. Artist Park McArthur disturbs Ukeles's
MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY 43
positive spin on dependency in her largely autobiographical text, video,
and performance works. Through her work, McArthur grapples with
the realities of being a disabled or differently-abled individual in a soci-
ety that does not recognize the essential nature of dependency. Such a
society creates a health-care and welfare system that assumes and plans
for the temporary needs of the generally mobile and independent indi-
vidual, leaving little space and insufficient resources to deal with those
who need longer-term care. Faced with the financial realities of long-
term assistance and care, McArthur has looked to an alternative in the
form of a care collective, and her work revolves around the relationships
engendered by her physical, financial, and emotional indebtedness.
In her wall label works Carried & Held and Abstraction (both 2012-
13), she lists the support systems that have allowed her to function in
a productive way. As the title implies, Carried & Held lists the various
people who have held her or picked her up throughout her life — both
those she knows and those she does not — with a description of who they
were. Interrupted by a random grouping of emoticons and including
certain vague descriptions such as "Unknown Taiwanese Businessman"
or "middle school history teacher David somebody," the list provides a
sense of the personal, affective nature of these relationships, some of
which last only through one encounter while others occur again and
again. This affective component in combination with the impersonal
descriptions of certain individuals reveals the sense of vulnerability
implicit in dependency relationships. McArthur's vulnerability is fur-
ther illustrated in her video and performance work, including It's Sorta
Like a Big Hug (2012). The video, shot at close range without sound,
focuses on the bodily movements and negotiations necessary to move
McArthur from her wheelchair to her bed. Exposing the intimacy of
these movements, and the degree to which McArthur must rely on
her caregiver to place and care for her body, the work gives us a clear
physical sense of vulnerability and responsibility. As seen in this work,
dependency implicitly creates an inequality between people that can be
reciprocated only partly, often in the form of affective bonds, and this
inequality is where the vulnerabilities of both charge and caretaker lie.
In Kittay's words,
The relationship between the dependency worker and her charge
is importantly a relation of trust. The charge must trust that the
44 NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS
/•
dependency worker will be responsible to and respectful of her
vulnerability and will not abuse whatever authority and power has
been vested in her to carry out these responsibilities. The depen-
dency worker must, in turn, trust the charge neither to make
demands that go beyond her true needs, to exploit the attach-
ments that are formed through the work of care, nor exploit the
vulnerabilities that either result from the dependency work, or
that have resulted in the caregiver engaging in dependency work."
But the personal, affective side of this labor is not the only aspect of
care McArthur's work touches on. Another wall label work describes
the various financial resources, from grants and re-grants to gifts and
loans, that have allowed McArthur to live a somewhat independent and
productive life despite the pressing financial burden of her bodily care.
In Nirmala Erevelles's materialist analysis of the disabled subject, she
speaks of how capitalism, in its need for efficiency, productivity, and a
market of surplus labor has "effectively excluded disabled people from
participating as wage workers and therefore rendered them dependent
on the state."" Similarly, she describes how the globalization of trans-
national capitalism has lead to the shifting of jobs overseas, creating
economic crises that lead to cuts in public spending and the slashing
of budgets for government programs that support the disabled, which
range from financial support to public health care, job training and
placement programs, and meal delivery services, to name a few.'3 As
the needs of the disabled may be in excess of what either they them-
selves can earn or beyond what their families can afford, the loss of
state support forces individuals to spend much time and energy simply
seeking the financial resources to continue living, a state of affairs that
further alienates them from "productive" society and points to a general
devaluing of the disabled subject. Such a devaluing of a select group of
citizens, as of any minority group, calls into question the ethical priori-
ties of our society; once it is considered permissible to leave one group
unconsidered and uncared for, everyone else is at risk of the same dis-
crimination once they are considered unproductive. We must remember
that the able-bodied state we take for granted as the basis for a "normal"
life is actually just a temporary state, for as children and elderly persons,
or when faced with unforeseen medical conditions, we are rendered vul-
nerable and in need of care. Thus the risks she points out for the disabled
body have real effects for all of us.
MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY 45
However, dependency is not confined only to social relations
between individuals. In addition to certain economic aspects of depen-
dency I have already touched on, the body also depends on the physi-
cal world, including architecture, urban space, and communications.
As Butler writes, bodies "can persist and act only when they are sup-
ported, by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of sociality
and belonging."14 Ukeles begins to address issues of dependence on the
physical world through her work with the New York City Department
of Sanitation, most specifically in the multi-part Touch Sanitation (1979-
84). Over the course of the project, she met and spoke with many "San
men," learning not only about their interactions with the public but also
about the system and labor conditions of waste management. In two
later video components of the work, Sanman Speaks and Waste Flow
(both 1979-84), she reveals the physical conditions of sanitation work:
the sheer volume of material being transported, the bodily manipula-
tions required and the ensuing damage that can be caused by such work,
and the unbelievable variety of the refuse. By exposing the quantity of
waste and the complexity of waste management systems through narra-
tive interviews, shadowing waste workers, and documenting the move-
ment of waste from residences to landfills — in word, movement, and
image — she attempts to show how "productive" consumer cycles make
us dependent on the unseemly and unacknowledged work of the waste
management system. As she writes in her "Sanitation Manifesto,"
Sanitation, as an environmental energy system, is trapped in a
miasma of essentially pre-democratic perceptions. The public
generally doesn't "see" beyond the tip of its nose — or see where we
put our waste, or see what we do or should do with it, or see what
choices we have about managing our waste .... To begin to accept
as "ours" the difficult social task of dealing with "our" waste at the
highest, not the most mediocre, level of intelligence and creativity
in reality, in all its effulgent scale here, people need to understand
how they connect one to the other across our society, in all its
scale. We need holistic inter-connected perceptual models of how
we connect and how we add up.'5
Of course, sanitation and waste management are not the only systems
that illuminate our dependence on the physical world. Yve Laris Cohen,
a trained dancer and artist, creates sited performances that expose the
individual's various dependencies on physical space. His performances,
46 NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS
if ,
ons
Jit)
Yve Laris Cohen, Waltz; Cross Hesitation, 2012. White wall, white floor, white
wall, white floor, black wall, black floor, white transsexual. Performance views,
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, May 18, 2012
MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY
47
■/,: .....' ,4 '*> /
■■?
designed in response to the architecture of the nontraditional spaces
in which he usually works — hallways, galleries, closets, and storage
spaces — place the body in direct opposition to the architecture while
still remaining subject to its structures. In Coda (2012) he repeatedly
performed a series of chaine turns down the length of an eighty-feet-
long by three-feet-wide hallway, after using his T-shirt as a rag to wipe
down the hallway's wall (to which a sprung floor had been attached). In
conflating the repetition of rehearsal — a form of bodily maintenance —
and the labor of cleaning with formal performance, Laris Cohen equates
aesthetic production with maintenance work. In pushing the limits of
his body to maintain the spin down the narrow space, he also simul-
taneously illustrates how the movements of our bodies through space
are necessarily circumscribed by architecture. Architecture, while not
restricting us entirely, still delimits our movements through both pri-
vate and public spaces in countless unseen and unacknowledged ways,
structuring the way we see and understand our world. Our ability to live
is heavily determined by the public, commercial, corporate, and private
architectures we find ourselves in, and we become dependent on them
to facilitate our productivity, our efficient movement through public
space, and our nightly recovery.
Laris Cohen also points to the way the supposedly independent
creative act depends on other structures beyond architecture, contra-
dicting our understanding of self-sufficiency and the myth of the lone
genius artist. Toward the end of many of his performances, he recites a
text listing in an almost confessional manner all of the materials, time,
assistance, and production necessary to realize the work. By revealing
this material, the statement exposes how creative practice necessarily
depends on development and maintenance mechanisms such as fund-
ing, grants, and other economic systems; the material production of
manufacturing; and social systems of support, among others. By calling
attention to these larger systems, Laris Cohen shows how a creative
practice is always constituted and maintained in relation to both human
and nonhuman others.
While Laris Cohen's work touches on infrastructure in the form
of architecture and economic systems, there is another ubiquitous sys-
tem we find ourselves dependent on in the contemporary world: com-
munications technology. With regard to the disabled body, Erevelles
NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS
ss#
••; . -•>
*."■*-
■claims that "the very viability of this disabled body is often sustained
and rendered 'livable' through a network of communication technolo-
gies and biotechnologies.""' While this dependence on communications
technologies may be especially conspicuous for a body that has limited
ability to move, even those of us who are more mobile can find our-
selves helpless when faced with a problem in a communications system.
These technologies, from the landline and mobile phone to the inter-
net and even to satellite communications, have become integral to the
exchange of information that drives our economy and by extension our
living bodies. Although this technology makes up the infrastructure
of our contemporary world, we often forget about our vulnerability to
its failure. We take its functioning for granted, imagining such infra-
structures as solid and fixed, designed to function smoothly rather than
improvised from a variety of components developed independently and
fit together imperfectly. In the case of communications technology, this
impression of perfect order is further exacerbated by our interfaces with
these systems — computers, mobile phones, and tablets — that lead us to
imagine them as "virtual," non-physical networks, distancing us from
an understanding of the ways in which such systems are vulnerable to
the vagaries of time, weather, and human error.
A poignant reminder of the precarious and adamantly physical nature
of this system we like to fantasize as immaterial can be found in Taryn
Simon's eloquent image Transatlantic Sub-Marine Cables Reaching Land
(2007). A mundane, nondescript, office-like space complete with off-
white walls and a vinyl tile floor is transected by five thick orange and
yellow cables running up the wall like a ladder, protected only by a short
metal barrier that resembles a railing. The presence of this conduit, so
essential for our ability to communicate with Europe, Western Asia,
and Africa, in the context of a familiar utilitarian office space void of
any spectacular protections and so similar in appearance to the Ethernet
cables we use and discard freely when they are worn out, shows the frag-
ile and essentially material nature of the networks we rely on to sustain
the supposedly virtual worlds of email, the internet, financial markets,
and the like. In exposing the vulnerability of the infrastructure of wires
and cables that creates the internet, Simon's work reminds us that vir-
tual communication is also an embodied experience, different but no
less risky than face-to-face conversation or protest. Communications
MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY 49
%.
.2!' "
!*'. \<)i*. ■
technologies may goad us into a perception of ourselves as free and
unfettered by our physical forms, but in fact "the use of the technol-
ogy effectively implicates the body. Not only must someone's hand tap
and send, but someone's body is on the line if that tapping and sending
gets traced."'7 Just as we are physically dependent on this system, we are
also implicated in it, physically, socially, and politically. Our embodied
nature makes us reliant upon these systems of communication, architec-
ture, sanitation, and care, thereby implicating us in a set of connections
that constitutes us as essentially social beings.
Maintenance and dependency are not equivalent; there are things
we maintain simply because we value them and not out of any need.
Nonetheless, maintenance illuminates dependency because those rela-
tionships and things on which we depend must be maintained. As
Butler reminds us, "we cannot exist without addressing the Other and
without being addressed by the Other . . . there is no wishing away
our fundamental sociality." At the same time, this interdependence
does not contradict our independence or our difference, for "no matter
how much we each desire recognition and require it, we are not there-
fore the same as the Other, and not everything counts as recognition
in the same way."18 While dependence and liberty are not incompat-
ible, they are always in tension. The desires and needs of individuals,
including their rights, are not always compatible with those of other
members of society, and the conflicts caused by these incompatibili-
ties must be regulated by our social and political systems. Recognizing
our dependency on others is a necessary step toward a more egalitar-
ian society because it provides us with an appreciation of the primacy
of responsibility over rights, creating a more inclusive way to define
social and political justice. At the same time, examining dependency
uncovers our reliance on the nonhuman, physical world, reminding us
of our embodied existence. It is in the process of acknowledging our
interconnectedness that we come to terms with the complexities and
pitfalls — physical, emotional, social, political — of our already exis-
tent dependencies. By extension, acknowledging this interconnect-
edness also repositions maintenance as both an indispensible activity
and essential value for our long-term health and that of our society.
50 NINA HORISAKl-CHRISTENS
< 0 •
Notes
i See Andrew Rosenthal, "You Didn't Build That," New York Times, Taking
!it Note blog, February 27, 2012, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/20.12/07/27/
you-didnt-build-that/.
2 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Sanitation Manifesto!" (1984), The Act 2, no. 1,
1990, 84-85.
3 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, "Out of Order: Understanding
Repair and Maintenance," Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3, May 2007, 6;
available online at http://tcs.sagepub.eom/cgi/content/abstract/24/3/1.
4 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition, 'Care,'" reproduced in this catalogue, p. 118.
5 Graham and Thrift, 6.
6 Ukeles, "Sanitation Manifesto!" 85.
7 Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and
Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999), 25.
8 Kittay, 100-146. For a full discussion of the differences between Rawls's
social-contract formulation of equality and Kittay 's dependency argument, see
Kittay, chps. 2-4.
9 Judith Butler, "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street," in
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg
McLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 135.
10 For more on the ways artists have take up the complexities of care rela-
tionships, see the catalogue of the 2004-05 Independent Study Program exhi-
bition, curated by Sasha Archibald, Sarah Lookofsky, Cira Pascual Marquina,
and Elena Sorokina: Archibald et al., At the Mercy of Others: The Politics of Care
(exhibition catalogue) (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005).
11 Kittay, 35.
12 Nirmala Erevelles, "In Search of the Disabled Subject," in Embodied
Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia
Lewiecki-Wilson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 100.
13 Ibid., 93.
14 Butler, "Bodies in Alliance," 124.
15 Ukeles, "Sanitation Manifesto!" 85.
16 Erevelles, 97.
17 Butler, "Bodies in Alliance," 131.
18 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), 33.
MAINTENANCE AND DEPENDENCY CI
MMiMms
.1 l:**'»
Goldin+Senneby, Headless Symbol, 2007. Designed byjohan Hjerpe
THE HOUSE OF
INVISIBLE CARDS
Jason Waite
In the aftermath of the recent recession and subsequent economic mal-
aise we have witnessed the havoc wreaked by the financialization of the
economy — by the very maintenance instruments originally intended to
mitigate risk. Financialization consists of the "diversion of savings from
household economies" into securities and other financial instruments
that "shift the financing of the economy from the banking sector to
the securities sector," wherein leverage begins to overtake equity as the
dominate form of capital.1 An example of these new financial vehicles
are derivatives, which were devised as a means of providing insurance,
similar to a hedge where one puts forward a small amount of money
to insure against a loss. These derivatives were later transformed into
means of wagering bets, similar to taking out an insurance policy on
someone else's home and then collecting the full value of the house
when it burns down. In this the new speculative financial economy a
"shadow banking system" emerged that went largely unnoticed in the
public sphere and was left by regulators to manage itself.2
This narrative is now familiar to us as we feel daily the effects of the
systemic malfunction of the economy fomented by these instruments.3
However, since the crisis, a widening search for new productive havens
for capital has developed as capital seeks to embed itself in other main-
tenance systems, the domestic sphere in particular. Mortgages, credit
cards, payday loans, financing, retirement savings, and investments
have all become a normal part of managing the household.4 No lon-
53
^
ger is it just the structure of the house that is being speculated on and
securitized. Today sophisticated instruments previously exclusive to the
realm of savvy investors are now available to homeowners in the form
of housing derivatives to hedge their potential loss if they try to sell
their property and the overall value of the housing market decreases.5
However, in a paper on the difference between the use of these financial
instruments in the domestic sphere and their use by institutional inves-
tors, Dick Bryan, Randy Martin, and Mike Rafferty argue
For labor to "really" be on the same footing as capital would
require that labor could take on the risk management capacities of
capital. The most fundamental of these is limited liability, which
is now integral to the corporate form of capital. For labor, this
would involve the construction of a fictive legal entity that stands
for labor but is not itself labor. But the accumulation of capital is
predicated on the fact that the worker cannot be separated from
their labor power: the worker is concurrently commodity capital
and variable capital, and the difference in these values is the basis
of surplus value.6
The ontological difference between an individual and an investment
firm is the juridical protection afforded to latter in the form of limited
liability companies, which protect individuals in the firm from liability
for their financial losses. Investment firms can offshore risk and walk
away from a bad deal whereas individuals are tattooed with their credit
history and even in bankruptcy are not absolved from such obligations
as student loans. And "sexually transmitted debt" is no longer solely
restricted to formerly hetero-normative relationships such as marriage
because the joining of finances between partners is increasingly becom-
ing inscribed in law with civil unions and same-sex marriage.7 How
can we understand this appearance of economic value in the domestic
sphere and its articulation in the cultural field?
One artistic practice that makes visible how economic value is pro-
duced in the domestic sphere is that of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and
her "maintenance art." Its origins lie in the "Manifesto for Maintenance
Art" first published in Artforum in January 1971, which called for a
reevaluation of everyday household activities and of their capacity to
be works of art.8 In the text, Ukeles claims that the performance of a
maintenance activity does not need to be enacted in a gallery or museum
but can be undertaken in situ. This theoretical proposition led Lucy
54 JASON WAITE
if ---
%
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Tasks, 1973. Photographic album.
Installation view next to an album containing N.E. Thing Co.'s North American
Time Zone Photo-VSTSimultaneity, October /<?, igjo, in c. 7,500, Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis, 1973
THE HOUSE OF INVISIBLE CARDS
55
Lippard to invite Ukeles to put the declaration into practice and to
participate in the exhibition c. 7,500 that Lippard was curating. Ukeles,
began making an album of everyday maintenance activities, taking
photographs that include her daily maintenance work in the household
for Maintenance Art Tasks (1973). Each activity is depicted in a series of
photographs in order to capture the increments of time involved. The
series seeks to move beyond a solely symbolic representation so view-
ers can "perceive the details of the sequence of maintenance tasks," a
major aspect of maintenance that is "almost impossible to see."1' The
multitude of images — each activity is documented with between twelve
to over ninety images — meticulously depicts the labor time needed for
each event, frame by frame. When compiled into an album, the images
require that viewers take their own time to go through each of the
pages. Meanwhile, the series format replaces the affective mnemonic
of the snapshot taken at holidays or on vacations typical of the family
album. The focus is not on the growth or development of subjects nor on
tracing a genealogy of the everyday activities. Instead, the album high-
lights repetition and sameness. Through this persistent form, a radical
ennui thrusts maintenance into the realm of visual culture and the field
of the political.
Ukeles's manifesto shifts the discourse of domestic labor into the
public sphere, as a number of other feminist activists and authors had
already, but six years before Silvia Federici wrote her influential "Wages
Against Housework," which advocated for the recognition of such
labor as a "political perspective" which had the potential to "produce
a revolution in our lives and in our social power as women."10 Ukeles
is traditionally categorized under the rubric of feminist art, and this is
understandable given that her turn toward maintenance was predicated
on her dual position as a young mother and artist, and her affiliation
with West-East Bag, a feminist newsletter and organizing group started
by Judy Chicago, Lucy Lippard, and Miriam Schapiro." However, the
images in the Tasks album also eschew certain traditional gender bar-
riers— they document her husband changing their baby's diaper, for
instance — in order to broaden the scope of what constitutes mainten-
ance, and who performs these essential tasks. The album also extends the
scope of maintenance into the social sphere to include doctor's check-
ups, visits to the barber shop, or even a fireman washing his car, thereby
56 JASON WAITE
v..
linking unremunerated, ostensibly private domestic activities with the
exchange value of other public activities and services. Maintenance Art
Tasks dismantles these distinctions and collapses them into the single
site of the album, a site which renders them all as maintenance activi-
ties visible in the public sphere, even if that sphere already relies on this
labor without acknowledging it. Ukeles presciently begins to make this
domestic space and its multitude of tasks visible and open for examina-
tion at the same moment that financialization begins.
In the time between the publishing of Ukeles's manifesto and the
production of her maintenance art album, the U.S. was undergoing its
own radical maintenance period, the aftermath of which gave rise to
new forms of the financial economy. On a hot Sunday in August 1971,
right before the cowboy drama Bonanza was to air, President Richard
Nixon addressed the nation to blaze a new trail for the economy. His
announcement came in the midst of funding the Vietnam War, rising
unemployment, increasing inflation, and the falling value of the U.S.
dollar, to which other national currencies were fixed under the Bretton
Woods international economic system put in place after World War II.
Europe was tired of undervaluing its currencies in order to prop up the
dollar and was beginning to cash in its large dollar reserves for gold.
Facing upcoming elections, Nixon did not want to preside over the
emptying of Fort Knox and the crash of the dollar. Instead of making
incremental changes, Nixon went on TV to announce a stunning deci-
sion: the U.S. would abandon the gold standard on which the dollar,
then the de facto world currency, had been based. The dollar would no
longer be convertible into gold and its value would now float in rela-
tion to other currencies. To mitigate the potential shock to the U.S.
economy, socialist-style controls on prices of commodities and wages
were imposed for three months. The wagons were being circled into a
soviet geometry at the same moment the new financial economy was
being created. This transition to a fiat currency — the ultimate form of
deregulation — was the first step toward the subsequent loosening of
controls over the financial system that would lead to the financial crises
at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.
In a bizarre inversion, this first step in the acceleration of free-floating
capital was the radical act of instituting price controls, an attempt to
maintain the everyday economy and secure the domestic sphere from
THE HOUSE OF INVISIBLE CARDS 57
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price hikes. This pause that allowed for the temporary institution of a
managed market was soon abandoned and neoliberalism inaugurated
the unfettered global expansion of finance.
One of the collateral effects of financialization is its unmooring
of capital, allowing it to circulate ever more widely across the globe,
including through the practice of offshoring. The setting up of shell
companies by individuals or multinational corporations in tax havens
such the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, and Jersey in order to trans-
fer profits and income outside of the reach of financial regulation and
tax collectors becomes part of the "merry-go-round of monetary trans-
mission."12 The current total value of these accounts is estimated to
equal about twenty trillion dollars, twice the total national wealth of
the UK." The project Head/ess (2007-ongoing) by the Swedish artists
Goldin+Senneby attempts to make this transmission of capital visible by
narrating, from multiple perspectives, a search for an offshore company
of the same name they ostensibly set up. The duo always have represen-
tatives take their place: Goldin+Senneby "commission" proxies to create
material for the project, from public appearances and performances to
the production of films and publications. Complicit in this operation
is an outsourced web of academics, writers, filmmakers, and viewers,
some of whom willingly take part, while others participate unknow-
ingly, and some further still are completely fictitious. The project's name
takes inspiration from a translation of Acephale, the secret antifascist
organization of artists and writers set up by Georges Bataille. Here
strategies of anonymity and even mysticism common to both Acephale
and offshoring create an uneasy parallel that shifts and oscillates but is
never resolved. The absence of both the artists and capital raises issues
of withdrawal and displacement, which are also explored in the book
Looking for Headless.1* Commissioned from the author John Barlow,
who writes under the pseudonym K.D., the novel features a protagonist,
also named John Barlow, who describes his experience searching in the
Bahamas for the anonymous company. In the course of his investiga-
tion, he visits the offices of Sovereign Trust, a multinational business
that helps set up offshore entities worldwide. By taking the form of a
novel, the project also circulates beyond the gallery and can enter the
reader's home, the domestic sphere which is ultimately forced to bear
the extra tax burden left behind by the absent capital being chased in
58 JASON WAITE
Goldin+Senneby, Headless at Regus, 2010. With Kate Cooper and Richard John
Jones (filmmakers). Digital video, color, sound; 28 min. Screening at Broadgate
Tower, City of London, 2010
THE HOUSE OF INVISIBLE CARDS
59 ti;'
the book. The recent mortgage crisis and crash of the housing market
have further shown the domestic space to be less a haven from the mar-
ket than a precarious shelter that can be lost to it. Highlighting the dis-
tinction between capital and labor pointed out by Bryan, Rafferty, and
* Martin, the project explores the mechanisms by which offshore shell
|3& entities cloak the body of the capitalist in juridical armor while exposing
*."/"• others to the shocks of the market.
The pervasiveness of financialization has so embedded itself in the
domestic sphere that it is now situating itself next to the quotidian tasks
of washing the dishes and child care. In Japan, housewives have tradi-
tionally managed household affairs and finances, usually investing the
country's sizable savings in conservative life insurance policies and sav-
ing bonds. However, a new phenomenon has taken hold over the last
few years as domestic interest rates began to drop and the household
managers looked for new sites of investment."1 The women began to
trade currency online, borrowing millions of yen (large sums of money
are needed to turn a profit) at rates of 2 to 3 percent on the principle,
;. .' at high levels of leverage and risk that were previously available only
jL to financial institutions. The money was traded into accounts in other
countries where they could earn higher interest and then carry back the
difference, hence its title as a "carry trade." As stories of a few big earn-
ers began to circulate, more housewives joined the boom, and soon for
many women day trading became a normal activity fitted in between
tending to the children and preparing meals — with some risking and
losing their entire life savings in the sudden economic downturn.'6 The
movement gained notoriety as it has had a large impact on domestic and
international markets, collectively trading the equivalent of billions of
dollars a day and creating one of the largest currency trading blocks in
the world.'7 The women earned the nickname "Mrs. Watanabe" (a typi-
cal Japanese surname literally meaning "cross borders") in the financial
press and their trading activity is closely monitored by world markets.
The maintenance of the domestic sphere here has become a site of spec-
ulation with systemic consequences.
Given this ever-increasing financialization of the domestic sphere,
how can art contest these neoliberal transformations when previous sites
of refuge from capital have themselves been transformed into specu-
lative instruments? The artists discussed here take two very different
60 JASON WAITE
v:*"-~ ■*
approaches to this problem. Ukeles confronts the invisibility of labor
and of affective value in the domestic sphere by transforming mainte-
nance activities into art, bringing them into the visual and discursive
realm. This transposition can be seen as a political gesture, making visi-
ble labor that needs to be revalued and reconsidered. Making public that
which supports the public, Ukeles articulates domestic maintenance as
a site of contestation against the abstracting, speculative tendencies of
financialization. In the process, her work draws attention to the produc-
tion of affects and other critical forms of value that cannot be entirely
quantified by the market. Goldin+Senneby's project, on the other hand,
is immersed in the tumultuous flows of financial capitalism; by setting
up their own offshore company, they appropriate the instruments of the
financial economy and embed their work in the circulation of capital.
Highlighting these obscure vehicles instigates a complex investigation
into the new movements of capital. Relying on proxies for the actual
production of the artwork and the articulation of the project, this new
acephalian association exposes their collaborators while insulating the
artists from view. Their retreat (back into the domestic sphere?) posits
new strategies of authorship while deploying the instruments of capital
as a buffer to renegotiate a distinction between the public and private
spheres. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced
that the domestic sphere — the "household sector" in their words — is
"'the shock absorber of last resort,'" the battle lines over the effects of
financialization had been fundamentally redrawn.'8 Financialization
has enveloped the structure of the home and the everyday maintenance
work taking place inside. As another site of struggle, artistic practices
can help us to recognize as essential the operations that maintain life,
and thereby articulate forms of latent value that confound quantifiable
metrics and resist marketization. Within this context of financializa-
tion, maintenance can be posited as a counterhegemonic force that
combats the totalizing logic of the financial economy, a logic that has
destabilized the domestic sphere and made it ever more precarious.
THE HOUSE OF INVISIBLE CARDS 6l
:<i -\
Notes
i Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the
War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008), 21.
2 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.
3 For a thorough account of the effects of financialization on the eco-
nomic recession, see Harvey; and Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial
Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva (New York: Semiotext(e), 2010).
4 Many of these instruments pertain to households in the global North.
However, the increasing role of financialization in the global South in the
form of microfinance has further extended the access to capital in the domestic
sphere.
5 "Housing Derivatives: Spark of Invention," The Economist, August 20,
2009, http://www.economist.com/node/14258966.
6 Dick Bryan, Randy Martin, and Mike Rafferty, "Financialization and
Marx: Giving Labor and Capital a Financial Makeover," Review of Radical
Political Economics 41, no. 458, December 2009, 470.
7 Jane Pollard, "Gendering Capital: Financial Crisis, Financialization
and (an Agenda for) Economic Geography," Progress in Human
Geography, November 26, 2012, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/
11/26/0309132512462270.^11.
8 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition, 'Care,'" reproduced in this catalogue, pp. 118—
121; originally published in excerpted form in Jack Burnham, "Problems of
Criticism," Artforum, January 1971, 41.
9 "Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Conversation with Alexandra Schwartz,"
in Cornelia Butler et al., From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard's
Numbers Shows 1969-J4 (Afterall: London, 2012), 283.
10 Silvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework" (1975), in Revolution at
Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, 2012), 15-16. The "Wages for Housework" campaign had begun earlier
than Federici's essay.
11 "Ukeles in Conversation with Alexandra Schwartz," 281.
12 Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), 31.
13 "The Missing $20 Trillion," The Economist, February 16-22, 2013, 13.
14 K.D., Looking for Headless (n.p.: Goldin+Senneby, 2008). This volume
contains only the first four chapters of a projected twelve-chapter work.
15 See, for example, "Mrs. Watanabe Learns to Invest," The Economist,
December 16, 1999, http://www.economist.com/node/269634.
16 Martin Fackler, "Japanese Housewives Sweat in Secret as Markets
Reel," New York Times, September 16, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/
i6/business/worldbusiness/i6housewives.html.
62 JASON WAITE
I
i 'it »
17 Katie Martin, "The Forex Power of Mrs. Watanabe," Wall Street Journal,
September 27, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702044224
04576594493550582376.html; and Ben McLannahan, "Mrs. Watanabe Brings
Her Money Back Home," Financial Times, October 3, 2011, http://www.ft.com/
intl/cms/s/o/42f209b6-df8f-neo-845a-ooi44feabdco.html.
18 International Monetary Fund, Global Financial Stability Report,
April 2005, p. 5, available online at http://www.imf.org/External/Pubs/FT/
GFSR/2005/oi/index.htm.
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ARTISTS
Michael Bramwell, Building Sweeps — Harlem, 1995-96. Inkjet print, 14 x 11 in.
(35.6 x 28 cm)
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MICHAEL BRAMWELL
Performance artist Michael Bramwell focuses on forgotten systems of
maintenance: his early work addresses the seeming invisibility of main-
tenance workers (often minorities) and his later work draws attention
to overlooked physical spaces. In both cases Bramwell engages in the
maintenance act of sweeping and in the process holds up maintenance
as a life-sustaining practice, one that opposes the effects of extreme
entropy in Harlem tenement buildings or as a means of caring for for-
gotten sites of trauma.
Bramwell's practice revalues communities and monuments through
the maintenance act itself, adding value to them by rehabilitating pub-
lic spaces. During Building Sweeps (1995-96), Bramwell began clean-
ing the public spaces of the most neglected tenement buildings that he
could find, choosing the buildings based on the amount of decay he
observed. Dressed as a janitor, Bramwell swept, tidied, and washed the
common spaces of one tenement building until gang members drove
him out. In response, Bramwell moved his practice elsewhere, seek-
ing similarly troubled sites around the world. By extending his work to
an international scale, he considers the shared problem of how sites of
traumatic histories are reclaimed and memorialized. He began to sweep
globally, traveling to and highlighting sites such as Tokyo Station, the
central railway station that was one site of the 1995 sarin gas attacks, or
Goree Island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, formerly a site for trading
African slaves.
67
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Michael Bramwell, The Great Sarin Sweep, 1996. Tokyo Station. Inkjet print,
11 x 14 in. (28 x 35.6 cm)
68
ARTISTS
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Michael Bramwell, Ground Zero Sweeps I— II: Peace Dome Sweep, 1996. Inkjet
print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 28 cm)
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MICHAEL BRAMWELL
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69
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Goldin+Senneby, Headless: From the Public Record, 2009-10. With Angus Cameron
(economic geographer), K.D. (fictional author), Kim Einarsson (curator/writer), Anna
Heymowska (set designer), Marcus Lindeen (director), Eva Rexed (actor). Public discus-
sion with slide projection. Installation view, Index, Stockholm
J$P
COLDIN+SENNEBY
The collaborative framework of Goldin+Senneby (formed 2004) has
been a site for Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby to investigate juridical
and financial forms, specifically the ways these forms are constructed
in space and in performance. The project Headless (2007-ongoing) has
centered on an offshore company set up by the artists called Headless
Ltd. The company's name invokes Georges Bataille's notion of with-
drawal as it was embodied in his secret group Acephale (Headless).
Goldin+Senneby have deployed a network of collaborators and proxies
who have been commissioned to search for the company and to repre-
sent the project in various ways, such as through lectures, performances,
and a novel. One of these vessels, Looking for Headless (2010) by the
artists Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones, takes the form of a docu-
mentary film that aims to track down an employee of Sovereign Trust,
a company that assists individuals and businesses in setting up offshore
entities. Through interviews with academics, private investigators, fic-
tionalized characters, and company representatives, a complex web
develops in parallel to the layers of bureaucracy that shroud Headless
Ltd. The film is then screened at Regus, a company that rents tempo-
rary office space to offshore companies and other businesses that need
a short-term, formal meeting place. For Maintenance Required, the film
will be screened at Regus offices on Wall Street, bringing the search to
a nexus of capital.
71
K.D., Lookingfor Headless, 2008. Chapters 1-4 of a novel commissioned by Goldin+Senneby |
72
Senr.e > Gold in+ Sen neby, AfterMkrosoft, CC-By-SA-2.5, 2.0, and 1.0, 2007. Installation view,
Kadist Foundation, Paris
GOLDIN + SENNEBY
73
Ashley Hunt, Corrections, 2001. Still from digital video, color, sound; 57 min
rest
ASHLEY HUNT
i
I
Ashley Hunt uses art as means to critically engage systems that privilege
certain populations along lines of race and socioeconomic status. Using
video, photography, and cartography, Hunt outlines patterns of exclu-
sion, drawing attention to dynamics of power that define social relations
' in the United States. Concerned with the contemporary expansion of
' the American prison system, in 1998 Hunt began the ongoing series
Jh'e Corrections Documentary Project to investigate the prison system. The
video Corrections (2001) is one part of the series of videos, posters, photos,
and drawings. Corrections documents the increasing privatization of the
prison system, exposing the misaligned incentives that drive politicians
and business professionals to support a growing, profit-based prison
system that serves neither the incarcerated nor the public. Although
advertised as a system that protects vulnerable members of society, the
growing prison system has a darker side. The system functions like a
corporation that encourages the expansion of incarceration and increas-
ing efficiency above all else — objectives that may be appropriate in busi-
ness but are dubious, misplaced, and alienating when applied to prisons
and public service. By recording corrections executives describing the
alleged financial benefits of increased incarceration, Corrections shows
the nefarious underbelly of a social maintenance system that harmfully
restructures entire communities.
i'i
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75
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Ashley Hunt, Corrections, 2001. Stills from digital video, color, sound; 57 min.
76
ARTISTS
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Ashley Hunt, Corrections, 2001. Still from digital video, color, sound; 57 min.
ASHLEY HUNT
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Masaru Iwai, sketch for Washing Stage, 2013. Watercolor and pen on paper, 8 1/4 x n 3/4
in. (21 x 29.9 mm)
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MASARU IWAI
Masaru Iwai's performances and video installations expose the precari-
ousness of maintenance: when applied overzealously or thoughtlessly,
cleaning can become an ineffectual or even destructive act. In Cleaners
High #/ (2008) the artist, in collaboration with visitors and over the
course of the exhibition, cleans a gallery with water and various deter-
gents until the space looks like it has fallen into a state of disrepair.
In Polishing House (2009), in which a drywall architectural structure
is "polished" with power sanders until it falls apart, Iwai shows how
maintenance turned into form and voided of intention leads to the very
destruction it is supposed to ward off. More recent works investigate the
colonial history of Japan, such as a recorded performance in which two
young Japanese clean a dilapidated colonial-era Japanese-style home in
Taipei with soap and water, using a crumpled Japanese flag as the clean-
ing rag.
For Maintenance Required Iwai is creating a new performance that
makes abstract the act of washing, turning it into a performance that
leaves on the stage's surface a residue reminiscent of an abstract paint-
ing. This action both damages the pristine minimalism of the stage and
foregrounds the act of cleaning by relating its remnants to another artis-
tic medium.
79
Masaru Iwai, Polishing Housing, 2009. Wood, plasterboard, aluminium sash, glass; 14 3/4
x 23 x 17 3/8 ft. (4.5 x 7 x 5.3 m). Installation views, Monne Porte, Nagasaki, Japan
80
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Masaru Iwai, Park Cleaning (Statue Wash), 2010. Performance view, Tokyo.
Chromogenic print, 46 1/16 x 36 7/8 in. (117 x 93.6 cm)
MASARU IWAI
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Yve Laris Cohen, Coda, 2012. Sprung floor, dancing transsexual. Performance ~S,
view, You Never Look at Me from the Place from Which I See You, SculptureCenter,
Long Island City, New York, January 15, 2012
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YVE LARIS COHEN
In his performance-based work, interdisciplinary artist Yve Laris
Cohen engages with the physical maintenance of both the body and the
exhibition space. Cohen's body performs multiple functions in his work:
trained as a ballet dancer and occasionally employed as an art handler,
Cohen is also transgendered, and often performs shirtless with his mas-
tectomy scar exposed. His body is often presented as an instrument
of grueling endurance and physical labor, as well as a coded symbol
(in certain works, "dancing transsexual" has been included as a mate-
rial in the exhibition wall labels). Cohen's performances also explore
the antagonistic potential that exists between artist and architecture.
During his performances, Cohen frequently builds temporary gallery
walls and "sprung" floors like those used by dancers, only to dismantle
them or violently destroy them by repeatedly performing upon them
the acts they traditionally support: for example, knocking temporary
walls over and executing multiple ballet jumps until the plaster is busted
through or the dancer is exhausted, or drilling into their surfaces hap-
hazardly. These worn or destroyed architectural elements then function
both as props in, and then relics of, the performance, while concurrently
mimicking and refuting the familiar formal language of pristine mini-
mal sculpture. Rather than fetishizing the endurance or maintenance
act per se, Cohen's work stages the site of maintenance as a migratory
area between the performer-laborer's body and the site of performance.
Cohen will develop a site-specific performance for Maintenance Required
that utilizes the unseen between-spaces in the Kitchen: transitional
zones such as stairs and elevators, as well as the seemingly stagnant but
constantly shifting realm of art storage hidden behind the peripheral
walls of the exhibition space.
83
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Yve Laris Cohen, Waltz; Cross Hesitation, 2012. White wall, white floor, white
wall, white floor, black wall, black floor, white transsexual. Performance view,
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, May 18, 2012
84
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Yve Laris Cohen, Duet.., 2011. Canvas, wood, corn starch, paper, foam, foam
core, cotton, polyester, spandex, vinyl, plastic, acrylic, aluminum, electricity,
sweat, yellow 5, transsexual, Thomas von Foerster. Performance view, Fisher
Landau Center for Art, New York, May 7, 2011
YVE LARIS COHEN
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Sam Lewitt, Test Subject A2 Fine, 2010. Helicopter pilot's helmet, Arizona test dust ISO
12103-1 (PTI ID: 10717F, Batch 16, Aug. 2010), photomount, adhesive vinyl lettering, 10
x 11 x 10 in. (25.4 x 27.9 x 25.4 cm)
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SAM LEWITT
Sam Lewitt stages the increasingly tenuous and disembodied nature of
data and information by investigating the raw materials that comprise
data-maintenance technologies, including instruments of data storage
and transfer such as printing-press blocks, computers, touch-screen
devices, and magnetized credit cards. Lewitt often uses the familiar but
opaque components of computers and touch-screen devices that have
been stripped of their function: disemboweled circuit boards, magne-
tized mechanical components, engraving acid, or the ferromagnetic
fluid used to form liquid seals around drive shafts in hard disks. By
pointing to the unstable nature of these materials, Lewitt's works also
indicate the inherent instability of the global systems upheld by these
components. He frequently uses digital techniques and synthetic mater-
ials to give objects and images an implicit historical provenance or a
patina of nostalgia.
In his Paper Citizens series (2010-n), for example, Lewitt takes high-
definition digital photographs of individual printing-press blocks, virtu-
ally collaging them so that the final images resemble assembled printing
plates, even though the blocks were never assembled that way in tan-
gible space. In the Test Subjects series (2010), Lewitt coats new, reflective
consumer items such as an Ikea mirror and a helicopter pilot's helmet
with artificially produced "Arizona test dust," used by auto manufactur-
ers and the military to wear down machinery to the point of mechanical
breakdown (a label indicating the dust grade is affixed to the plinth on
which the object rests). In these works, both the items and their decay
are ostensibly new, and the presentation is "dishonest"; yet the language
of degeneration is deployed as an allegory that touches on the produc-
tion of history and the instrumentalization of the authoritative image.
87,.
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Sam Lewitt, Debit Display, 2012. Surplus hard drive magnets, read/write spindle compo-
nent, demagnetized debit card, 35/8x7x4 in. (9.2 x 19 x 10.2 cm)
Sam Lewitt, Fluid Employment, 2012. Detail. Ferromagnetic liquid poured bi-weekly over
plastic sheets and magnetic elements, fans; dimensions variable; each sheet, 48 x 48 in.
(121. 9 x 121. 9 cm)
SAM LEWITT
Park McArthur, How to Get a Wheelchair over Sand, 2009. With Ben Fain and David
Prince. Temporary installation of wood, bamboo mats, concrete, sand; dimensions vari-
able. Saugatuck, MI
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PARK MCARTHUR
Park McArthur addresses issues of dependence and disability in her
text- and video-based practice by playing with and exposing the lin-
guistic, political, and social biases that circumscribe the disabled or
differently abled. As a disabled individual, McArthur relies on a col-
lective of people to care for her. Helping her with daily tasks including
getting out of bed, getting dressed, and taking a bath, this care collec-
tive circumvents the financial hardships created by relying on caregivers
provided through the health insurance system.
Many of her works, including a series of wall labels made up of
text and symbols titled Carried & Held and Abstraction (both 2012-13),
address the affective relationships among those in the collective, the
unequal but reciprocal interpersonal politics they engender, and the
physical realities they involve. One of the labels names all of the indi-
viduals who have ever carried her, and in another, all of the sources of
financial support that have enabled her to survive and work. Interrupted
by emoticons or overlaid on a background of phrases encrypted in sym-
bols, these texts serve as proxies for memory, incorporating the same
disruptions and failures we experience when remembering — often in
incomplete, emotional, or inconsistent ways — thereby humanizing what
could appear to be a clinical objectification of her networks of support.
9i
Park McArthur, It's Sorta Like a Big Hug, 2012. With Tina Zavitsanos, Aliza Shvarts, and
Amalle Dublon. Digital video, color, silent; 17 min.
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Park McArthur, Carried & Held, 2012-13. Inkjet print on museum board, 8 x
40 in. (20.3 x 101.6 cm)
PARK MCARTHUR
93
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Installation view of No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute, Arthur Ross Architecture
Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 2012-13
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SALVAGE ART INSTITUTE
The Salvage Art Institute (2009-ongoing) is a project created by the
artist Elka Krajewska as a platform to reclaim and exhibit the unique
afterlives of damaged artworks. Krajewska founded the nonprofit orga-
nization after discovering paraworks or "zombie art": broken or dam-
aged artworks that insurance companies have taken possession of after
paying for the loss claimed by a museum or collector. The works are
then held in storage instead of being destroyed. These objects are con-
sidered a total loss but they continue to exist in a state of limbo, in a
paradoxical state of zero value that undercuts the art market's totalizing
economic valuation of artworks. AXA Insurance has donated to the
institute a number of these works along with the paperwork and corre-
spondence that, after being censored by the company, are also available
for viewing. The broken objects are displayed on mobile carts that can
be moved around the space, and the works are often handled by visi-
tors. This renegotiation of the terms of display breaks down regimented
exhibition regimes and creates a different relationship with these objects
that have fallen out of circulation. The exhibition of these "works" by
Jeff Koons, Jim Dine, and others raises questions about their ontological
status as art and their symbolic status within both a damaged aesthetics
and entropic processes.
95 ! 4
SAI Policies
1 . SAI is a haven for all art officially declared as total loss, removed from art
market circulation, and liberated from the obligations of perpetual valuation and
exchangeability.
2. SAI claims stewardship over all total loss inventories as they are declared,
wherever and whenever, with or without physical transfer.
3. SAI considers the formal declaration of total loss an act of transformation and
subsequently refers to the transformed property as "No Longer Art."
4. SAI seeks to maintain the zero-value of No Longer Art and recognizes its right
to remain independent and divorced from the demands of future marketability.
5. SAI aspires to make the No Longer Art inventory accessible to the public view.
SAI provides an autonomous yet accessible space for No Longer Art to reveal its
qualities via interdisciplinary debate.
6. SAI approaches the No Longer Art inventory through a non-hierarchical sys-
tem and aims at democratic principles. Each item of SAI inventory can potentially
deliver equally valid revelations.
7. SAI conceives the declaration that an object is No Longer Art as the symmetri-
cal inversion of the subjective declaration that any object may
be art. The signature of the adjuster meets and cancels the signature of the
artist.
8. SAI eschews the aesthetics and sensationalism of damage. Rather, it is
devoted to examining the structural implications of total loss across art's
conceptual, material, legal, actuarial, and financial identities.
9. SAI is centered on the tactile objecthood of No Longer Art, on its obdurate
survival, and on its transformed physicality. SAI confronts viewers with the
material signs of alteration and the legible traces of each piece's history.
Salvage Art Institute, SAI policies, 2009-ongoing.
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I Salvage Art Institute, Wrapped SAI oo/o, materials: oil, linen, size 84" * gf, damage:
j/6/2009 torn in transit, claim: 8/20/2009; total loss: /0/2009, production: 2009, artist: Anton
Symmf, Henning, title: Interior No. jgi, n.d. Installation. Installation view, No Longer Art: Salvage
Art Institute, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 2012-13
SALVAGE ART INSTITUTE
97
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Karin Sander, Wallpiece 210 x 280, 2004. Polished wall paint, 82 1/3 x no 1/4 in. (210 x 280
cm). Installation view, Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York
KARIN SANDER
Karin Sander abstracts from the processes of maintenance, taking
maintenance techniques and applying them to exhibition environments
and objects. Sander makes a formal argument for maintenance as art
and holds up maintenance techniques as mirrors that reflect and mag-
nify the covert mechanisms and operations that support the exhibition
environment.
In her Mailed Painting series (2004-ongoing), Sander ships an
unwrapped and unprotected painting from her studio to an initial exhi-
bition site and then circulates the painting through global mail sys-
tems. When exhibited afterward, the altered painting incorporates the
shipping stickers and detritus accumulated on its surface through its
travels without the benefits of standard art packaging and crating. In
her series of Wallpieces (1994-ongoing), the wall of an exhibition space
is polished until its surface becomes reflective, formally exploring the
value of repetition and duration associated with maintenance by render-
ing it into an aestheticized art object. In an intervention at the Neue
Berliner Kunstverein, holes were placed in the floor where waste bins
had been located previously, creating an opening between the upstairs
offices and the ground-floor gallery space. Through the course of the
exhibition, the institution's waste paper was allowed to fall through the
holes in the ceiling into the gallery, where it eventually accumulated
into noticeable piles. Sander's work draws on both physical and bureau-
cratic maintenance systems entrenched in the art-exhibition complex,
making them into aestheticized, valued art products while inverting or
complicating the normal relationships between artwork, exhibition, and
administration.
99
II
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Karin Sander, Mailed Paintings, 2004-2011. Installation view, Curators' Series #4: Studies
for an Exhibition, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2011
ARTISTS
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Karin Sander, Kernbohrungen (Core Drillings), 2011. Waste paper from five offices in the
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, five holes cut through the floor of the offices and the ceiling
of the exhibition space, each hole 11 3/4 in. (30 cm) diameter
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KARIN SANDER
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Taryn Simon, Transatlantic Sub-Marine Cables Reaching Land, VSNL International, Avon,
New Jersey, 2007. Chromogenic print, 37 1/4 x 44 1/2 in. (94.6 x 113 cm) framed
TARYN SIMON
Taryn Simon explores the relationships between text, design, and pho-
tographic representation in order to question the authority of these
ostensibly analytical forms. At the same time, Simon's work opens up a
space to reconsider what is represented and how representational forms
change our understanding of objects, spaces, and narratives.
Simon's photographic series An American Index of the Hidden and
Unfamiliar (2007) depicts objects and spaces that, due to concerns
related to politics, security, marketing, or social acceptability, are kept
out of view and inaccessible. One seemingly banal image in the series
shows two thin cables running up the wall of a quotidian office space.
These precarious wires are the trans-Atlantic telecommunications cables
that carry data and voice traffic between the U.S. and Europe; the image
depicts their first contact with land in New Jersey. Another image shows
a small medical flask containing "live," replicating HIV to be used in
studies investigating the viability of fighting the virus with antibodies.
Exposing the precariousness of systems most of us take for granted —
the telecommunications infrastructure or the medical research indus-
try or our own personal biological maintenance systems, especially for
those who must contend with HIV daily — these photographs and their
everyday imagery hint at the ubiquity and constancy of maintenance.
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Taryn Simon, Live HIV, HIV Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Boston,
Massachusetts, 2007. Chromogenic print, 37 1/4 x 44 1/2 in. (94.6 x 113 cm) framed
104
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Taryn Simon, U.S. Customs Border Protection, Detainees, United States-Mexico Border
Control, West Desert Corridor, Arizona, 2007. Chromogenic print, 37 1/4 x 44 1/2 in. (94.6 x
113 cm) framed
TARYN SIMON
105
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Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation with letter, key card, PowerPoint presenta-
tion, office furniture, video; dimensions variable. Still from video
\ acti
PILVI TAKALA
Finnish artist Pilvi Takala's practice centers around acts of subtle inter-
vention. Takala often inserts herself into closed, specific communities —
a group of professional poker players in Bangkok, or patrons of a
shopping mall in Berlin, for example — and pushes the limits of social
codes. Although she enters these spaces quietly, her incongruous actions
invariably draw attention and disrupt given relations, inciting reactions
that expose the multifaceted network of societal norms that govern each
community.
In The Trainee (2008), Takala turns the traditional understanding
of work on its head. Embedding herself in the Helsinki office of the
multinational business services corporation Deloitte, Takala worked as
a public relations trainee. During her month-long "training," Takala
refused the banal series of tasks associated with office work — emailing,
photocopying, attending meetings — in order to sit at an empty desk and
incessantly ride the elevator. When prompted by her curious colleagues,
the artist claims that she is engaging in cognitive labor. Takala extends
Mierle Laderman Ukeles's practice (see p. in) by recasting maintenance
activities as repetitive intellectual labor, calling attention to its role in
the business sector. As a form of social commentary, Takala rejects
partaking in any outward display of production, questioning the way
development is measured at Deloitte. In the process, Takala's practice
subverts the structures of corporate development, while calling into
question contemporary forms of dematerialized labor.
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Pilvi Takala, Bag Lady, 2006. Still from slide show with two projectors showing
photographs and text; 8 min
108
ARTISTS
Pilvi Takala, Players, 2010. Still from digital video, color, sound; 8 min
PILVI TAKALA
109
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1979-80. Citywide performance with 8,500
New York City sanitation workers
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MIERLE LADERMAN
UKELES
In a 1969 manifesto, Mierle Laderman Ukeles defined a new type of
artistic practice: "maintenance art" (see pp. 118-121). Since then, her
performative and interdisciplinary work has explored maintenance as
a creative act. In her early work, Ukeles imparts value to the domestic
activities of housekeeping, childcare, and other care work. Her subse-
quent work confers value on the act of sanitation and municipal main-
tenance, contesting the social and class hierarchies in these systems.
In so doing, she shows how maintenance activities are integral to the
continued functioning of urban space, economic and political discourse,
and other so-called productive activities.
Ukeles's early Maintenance Art Tasks (1973) explores the complexity,
duration, and choreography of daily maintenance activities by docu-
menting them in detail: hair cuts, doctors visits, changing diapers, and
washing dishes among others. The numerous images of a single activity
indicate the extended time span that maintenance requires. In Touch
Sanitation (1979-80), Ukeles shook the hands of and personally thanked
all of the approximately 8,500 sanitation workers in the New York City
Department of Sanitation. Engaging in public space, Touch Sanitation
humanizes this alienating work and conveys the importance of a tra-
ditionally devalued sector of labor. As the project progressed, she also
documented the stories of these workers in the video Sanman Speaks
(1979-84), providing a space for the workers to articulate their own posi-
tions and experiences. The video also records the complex and dura-
tional process of collecting and disposing of waste, giving a sense of the
physical immensity of society's refuse. In the performance Maintaining
NYC in Crisis: What Keeps NYC Alive? (1976), Ukeles reads the job titles
of those in municipal bureaucracies threatened by the city's impending
bankruptcy but necessary to keep the the city functioning, a recitation
that can be read as both a living memorial and a declarative protest.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance: Sweep j, Staten Island, 6:00 a.m.
Roll Call, 1979-80. Citywide performance with 8,500 New York City sanitation workers
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Interviewing Passersby on the Sidewalk about Their
Maintenance Lives, 1973-74. Outside A.I.R. Gallery, New York. Part of the
Maintenance Art Performance series
MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
113
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, The Keeping of the Keys: Maintenance as Security, 1973. Three-
hour performance, c. 7,500, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, July 20, 1973. Part of
the Maintenance Art Performance series
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Inside,
1973. Performance view, c. 7,500, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, July
22, 1973. Part of the Maintenance Art Performance series
MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
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MANIFESTO FOR
MAINTENANCE
ART, 1969!
PROPOSAL FOR
AN EXHIBITION,
"CARE"
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MAINTENANCE ART
Proposal for an exhibition C/9r\£
IDEAS
The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:
The Death Instinct: separation, individuality; Avant-Garde
par excellence; to follow one's own path to death — do your
own thing, dynamic change.
The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the
perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival
systems and operations; equilibrium.
B. Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball
of every revolution: after the revolution, who's going
to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
Development: pure individual creation; the new; change;
progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.
Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual
creation; preserve the new; sustain the change;
protect progress; defend and prolong the advance;
renew the excitement, repeat the flight;
.. Il8 MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
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show your work — show it again
keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy
keep the home fires burning
Development systems are partial feedback systems with major
room for change.
Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little
room for alteration.
Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)
The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom
The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs =
minimum wages, housewives = no pay.
clean you desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor,
wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby's
diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the
fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking
garbage, watch out don't put things in your nose, what
shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don't
litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets,
go to the store, I'm out of perfume, say it again —
he doesn't understand, seal it again — it leaks, go to
work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again,
flush the toilet, stay young.
Art:
Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is
Art is Art. "We have no Art, we try to do everything
well." (Balinese saying)
Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected
by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities,
and maintenance materials.
Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development
and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.
E. The exhibition of Maintenance Art, "CARE," would zero in
on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and
yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.
MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, I969! II9
II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION: "CARE"
Three parts: Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance.
A. Part One: Personal
I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife.
I am a mother (Random order).
I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking,
renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also,
(up to now separately I "do" Art.
Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things,
and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.
I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with
my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition.
(Right? or if you don't want me around at night I would
come in every day) and do all these things as public Art
activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything,
wash the walls (i.e. "floor paintings, dust works, soap-
sculpture, wall-paintings") cook, invite people to eat,
make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional
refuse.
The exhibition area might look "empty" of art, but it will be
maintained in full public view.
MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK
Part Two: General
Everyone does a hell of a lot of noodling maintenance work. The
general part of the exhibition would consist of interviews of two kinds.
1. Previous individual interviews, typed and exhibited.
Interviewees come from, say, 50 different classes and kinds
of occupations that run a gamut from maintenance "man,"
maid, sanitation "man," mail "man," union "man," construction
worker, librarian, grocerystore "man," nurse, doctor, teacher,
MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
museum director, baseball player, sales"man," child, criminal,
bank president, mayor, moviestar, artist, etc , about "
-what you think maintenance is;
-how you feel about spending whatever parts of your
life you spend on maintenance activities;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and
freedom;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and
life's dreams
2 Interview Room — for spectators at the Exhibition:
A room of desks and chairs where professional (?) interviewers
will interview the spectators at the exhibition along same questions
as typed interviews. The responses should be personal.
These interviews are taped and replayed throughout the exhibition
area.
Part Three: Earth Maintenance
Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered
to the Museum:
-the contents of one sanitation truck;
-a container of polluted air;
-a container of polluted Hudson River;
-a container of ravaged land.
Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:
purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved
by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either
by myself or scientists.
These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the
exhibition.
MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969!
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Dimensions are in inches, followed
by centimeters; height precedes width
precedes depth.
Michael Bramwell
Building Sweeps — Harlem:
Worker Portrait, 1995-96
Inkjet print, 14 x n (35.6 * 28)
Courtesy the artist
Building Sweeps — Harlem:
Main Stairwell, 1995-96
Inkjet print, 14 x 11 (35.6 x 28)
Courtesy the artist
Building Sweeps — Harlem:
Mailbox Row, 1995-96
Inkjet print, 11 x 14 (28 x 35.6)
Courtesy the artist
Ground Zero Sweeps I— II:
Peace Dome Sweep, 1996
Inkjet print, 14 x n (35.6 x 28)
Courtesy the artist
Ground Zero Sweeps I— II:
. Collaborative Sweep,
Hiroshima, 1996
Inkjet print, 11 x 14 (28 x 35.6)
Courtesy the artist
The Great Temple Sweep II, 1996
Performance view, Nagasaki
Inkjet print, 11 x 14 (28 x 35.6)
Courtesy the artist
The Great Sarin Sweep, 1996
Tokyo Station
Inkjet print, 11 x 14 (28 x 35.6)
Courtesy the artist
Individual Work, Nagasaki, 1996
Inkjet print, 11 x 14 (28 x 35.6)
Courtesy the artist
Building Sweeps — Poland: Hallway
Elevation, 1995
Inkjet print, 14 x n (35.6 x 28)
Courtesy the artist
Building Sweeps — Poland, 1995
Public art action, Warsaw
Inkjet print, 14 x u (35.6 x 28)
Courtesy the artist
Goldin+Senneby
Headless at Regus, 2010-ongoing
Performance and film screening
with books, held at Regus offices
Courtesy the artists
Looking/or Headless, 2008
With fictional author K.D.
First four chapters of a novel,
7x4x1/4 (17.8 x 10.2 x .64)
Courtesy the artists
Looking/or Headless, 2010
With Kate Cooper and Richard
John Jones
Digital video, color, sound; 28 min.
Courtesy the artists
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
125
Ashley Hunt
Corrections, 2001
Digital video, color, sound;
59 min.
Courtesy the artist
Masaru Iwai
Washing Stage, 2013
Performance on stage with
shampoo, body soap, detergent
Courtesy the artist and Takuro
Someya Contemporary Art
Yve Laris Cohen
Seth, 2013
Performance with Seth Thomas
Courtesy the artist
Sam Lewitt
Test Subject A2 Fine, 2010
Helicopter pilot's helmet, Arizona
test dust ISO 12103-1 (PTI ID:
10717F, Batch 16, Aug. 2010),
photomount, adhesive vinyl
lettering, 10 x 11 x 10 (25.4 x 27.9
x 25-4)
Courtesy the artist and Miguel
Abreu Gallery
Park McArthur
Carried & Held, 2012-13
Inkjet print on museum board
8 x 40 (20.3 x 101.6)
Courtesy the artist
Abstraction, 2012-13
Inkjet print on museum board
8 x 40 (20.3 x 101.6)
Courtesy the artist
Salvage Art Institute
Not in Show, SAI 0025, material:
oil paint, wood, cardboard; size:
14 x jj 1/2 x 2"; damage: in transit
back to lender; claim: unknown;
total loss: unknown; production:
igg2, artist: Duane Slick, Title:
A Tale of Two Trees, n.d.
Installation
Courtesy the Salvage Art
Institute
Karin Sander
Wallpiece, 2013
Polished wall paint,
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
126
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
&? ■-■'•
Taryn Simon
Live HIV, HIV Research
Laboratory, Harvard Medical
School, Boston, Massachusetts, 2007
Chromogenic print, yj 1/4 x 44 1/2
(94.6 x 113) framed
Courtesy the artist and
Gagosian Gallery
Transatlantic Sub-Marine
Cables Reaching Land, VSNL
International, Avon, New Jersey,
2007
Chromogenic print, 37 1/4 x 44 1/2
(94.6 x 113) framed
Courtesy the artist and
Gagosian Gallery
Pilvi Takala
The Trainee, 2008
Installation with letter, key
card, PowerPoint presentation,
office furniture, video;
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and Carlos/
Ishikawa, London
MlERLE LADERMAN UkELES
Touch Sanitation Performance,
1979-80
Thirty color 35mm slides
Courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts
Touch Sanitation: Sanman Speaks,
1979-84
Video, color, sound; 58 1/2 min.
Courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts
Touch Sanitation: Waste Flow,
1979-84
Video, color, sound; 57 1/2 min.
Courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts
Maintenance Art Tasks, 1973
Bound photographic album con-
taining 240 photographs, each 3 x
4.5 (7.6 x 11. 4), album overall 12 x
12 (30.5 x 30.5)
Courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts
Excerpted text from "Manifesto
for Maintenance Art, 1969!
Proposal for an Exhibition,
'Care,'" (1969), Artforum, 1971
Printed matter, 11 x n (28 x 28)
Performance for Maintenance
Required, 2013
Title and details to be announced
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
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IMAGE CREDITS
p. 8 © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
P. 14 courtesy the artist
P. 17 courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London
p. 22 © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
p. 25 © 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP,
Paris; © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
P. 38 © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
P. 47 © Yve Laris Cohen, courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, photo:
Andreas Vesterlund
P. 52 courtesy the artists
P. 55 © the artists, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, photo: Eric Sutherland
for Walker Art Center
P. 59 courtesy the artists, photo: Anna Colin
PP. 66, 68-69 courtesy the artist
PP. 70, 72-73 courtesy the artists
PP. 74, 76-77 courtesy the artist
pp. 78, 80-81 © Masaru Iwai, courtesy Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
P. 82 © Yve Laris Cohen, photo: Jason Mandella © 2012 SculptureCenter
P. 84 © Yve Laris Cohen, courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, photo:
Andreas Vesterlund
P. 85 © Yve Laris Cohen
p. 86 courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, photo: Adam Reich
P. 88 courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, photo: Jeffrey Sturges
P. 89 courtesy the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Miguel
Abreu Gallery, photo: Jeffrey Sturges
PP. 90, 92-93 courtesy the artist
PP. 94, 97 courtesy the Salvage Art Institute, photo: Elka Krajewska
P. 98 photo: Studio Karin Sander
P. 101 photo: Stefan Alber
p. 100 photo: Luke Banks
P. 102 © 2007 Taryn Simon, courtesy Steidl/Gagosian; the full title reads:
Transatlantic Sub-Marine Cables Reaching Land, VSNL International, Avon,
New Jersey /These VSNL sub-marine telecommunications cables extend 8,037.4 miles
J>&
128
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:;■::
arrow the Atlantic Ocean. Capable of transmitting over 60 million simultaneous voice
conversations, these underwater fiber-optic cables stretch from Saunton Sands in the
United Kingdom to the coast of New Jersey. The cables run below ground and emerge
directly into the VSNL International headquarters, where signals are amplified and
split into distinctive wavelengths enabling transatlantic phone calls and internet
transmissions.
P. 104 © 2007 Taryn Simon, courtesy Steidl/Gagosian; the full title reads: Live
HIV, HIV Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts /
This flask contains Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that is infecting human
peripheral blood mononuclear cells and replicating. It will be used to study the neutral-
izing potential of antibodies against HIV, in both individuals infected with the virus
and participants in vaccine studies. The HIV Vaccine Trials Network was formed
when the federal government reorganized its HIV vaccine research program in 1999.
It is a division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases / There are
no documented cases of anyone infected with HIV developing sterilizing immunity.
More than 42 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. At the current rate of
infection, experts predict that 90 million people will be HIV carriers by 2010. A new
infection occurs approximately every 10 seconds.
P. 105 © 2007 Taryn Simon, courtesy Steidl/Gagosian; the full title reads: U.S.
Customs Border Protection, Detainees, United States-Mexico Border Control, West
Desert Corridor, Arizona / Apprehended by U. S. Customs and Border Protection
agents on foot patrol in the West Desert Corridor near Tucson, Arizona, the four men
in the photograph were 45 miles from the Mexican border. They had been traveling on
foot for four days and had between them 2 liters of 'water, j cans of tuna fish and $140.
Many individuals who cross the U.S. -Mexican border have done so multiple times.
Two of these four men claimed to have homes, family and employment in the United
States. All four plan to cross again after being processed through the U. S. Department
of Homeland Security's "voluntary return" program, which allows non-criminal
illegal aliens to return to their host country without being prosecuted. / The border
between the United States and Mexico is the most frequently crossed international
border in the world, both legally and illegally. The West Desert Corridor of the Sonora
Desert, one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America, is widely known as the
corridor of death. As a result of stronger border enforcement in urban and suburban
areas, more illegal immigrants are attempting to cross remote and dangerous areas of
the Corridor.
PP. 106, 108-109 courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London
pp. no, 112-115 © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
IMAGE CREDITS 129
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Col
i
Maintenance Required would not have been possible without the gener-
ous contributions and support of many friends, colleagues, and advisers.
We extend our deepest thanks and gratitude to Ron Clark, Director of
the Whitney Independent Study Program, for his guidance and unwav-
ering support; Sarah Lookofsky, Instructor for Curatorial Studies, for
her direction and commitment to the project despite all of its monu-
mental changes; Okwui Enwezor, Cassullo Fellow during the 2012-13
academic year, whose tutelage and critical feedback was always invalu-
able and well timed; and Karl Willers, Interim Instructor for Curatorial
Studies, for his incredible generosity and enthusiasm in sustaining the
final stages of the process. Their thoughtful counsel and imaginative
input throughout this project have been essential to its completion, and
their patience and good humor have made it a pleasure. We would also
like to thank the ISP's program assistant, Trista Mallory, for her orga-
nizational and intellectual support during the exhibition planning pro-
cess. We have benefited greatly from working with all of our colleagues
in the Independent Study Program and our discussions with them as
well as their crucial feedback have been formative in the development
of this project. In addition, the ongoing seminar discussions that took
place at the ISP during the year have greatly informed this curatorial
project.
For their time and consideration given to this project, we would
like to thank at the staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art,
including Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director; Donna De
Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs; and curators
Chrissie lies, Christiane Paul, Jay Sanders, Elisabeth Sussman, Dana
Miller, and Scott Rothkopf. Their questions and comments early on
in the process helped clarify and sharpen many aspects of the exhibi-
tion. We would also like to thank registrars Emilie Sullivan, Melissa
130
£■
V"..
Cohen, and Barbi Spieler; the art installation team; Nick Holmes for
legal advice; and Sarah Hromack and Sarah Meller for website and
social media components.
For making this catalogue possible, we would like to thank Benjamin
Young for his thorough, insightful, and patient editorial work and Rob
Carmichael for his inventive design and exhibition graphics.
Our profound gratitude goes to Marco Nocello at Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts for his valuable collaboration; and to Tim Griffin, Matthew
Lyons, Eben Hoffer, Zach Tinkelman, and Lumi Tan at The Kitchen
for their guidance and logistical support. For discussions that were
invaluable in the conceptualization and construction of the exhibition,
special thanks go to Benjamin Buchloh, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea
Fraser, and Chantal Mouffe. For their logistical help and technical sup-
port, special thanks go to Eleanore Hopper at Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts; Susanne Schroeder at Karin Sander's studio; Vanessa Carlos at
Carlos/Ishikawa; Dawn Burns at the Asian Cultural Council; Anne
Pasternak and Cynthia Pringle at Creative Time; Edward Schexnayder
and Miguel Abreu at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and James McKee at
Gagosian Gallery. We would also like to thank Joao Enxuto, Joshua
Neustein, and Sara Reisman. We also thank the Finnish Cultural
Institute in New York and Kol Brun for providing materials and techni-
cal support for this project.
For continued support of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program, we would like to thank Margaret Morgan
and Wesley Phoa, The Capital Group Charitable Foundation, and
the Whitney Contemporaries and their annual Art Party benefit.
Endowment support is provided by Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, the
Dorothea L. Leonhardt Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas,
the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, and the Helena Rubinstein
Foundation. We are greatly appreciative of the extraordinary opportu-
nity this support has made possible.
Finally, and most importantly, we convey our deepest gratitude to
the artists and public program participants. Your work and dedication
inspire us, and we thank you for your enthusiasm, generosity, and ideas
offered throughout this project.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 131
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This catalogue was published on
the occasion of the exhibition
Maintenance Required, May 30-
June 22, 2013, held at The Kitchen,
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY,
curated by Nina Horisaki-Christens,
Andrea Neustein, Victoria Rogers,
and Jason Waite, the 2012-13 Helena
Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the
Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program.
Support for the Independent Study
Program has been provided by
Margaret Morgan and Wesley
Phoa, The Capital Group Charitable
Foundation, and the Whitney
Contemporaries through their an-
nual Art Party benefit. Endowment
support is provided by Joanne
Leonhardt Cassullo, the Dorothea L.
Leonhardt Fund of the Communities
Foundation of Texas, the Dorothea
L. Leonhardt Foundation, and the
Helena Rubinstein Foundation.
© 2013 Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, NY
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form by any
means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or
any other information storage and re-
trieval system, or otherwise (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections
107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written per-
mission from the Whitney Museum
of American Art.
This publication was produced by the
Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program.
Editor: Benjamin Young
Project Managers: Sarah Lookofsky
and Benjamin Young
Designer: Rob Carmichael, seen
Printer: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Set in Adobe Caslon
Printed on Creekside Natural,
30% PCR
ISBN: 0-87427-159-2
Printed and bound in the
United States
LJJHITNEM
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave at 75th St.
New York, NY 10021
whitney.org
Printed in U.S.A.
ISBN: 0A71S71S1EI
780874"271
591
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